Drake Demonstration

This document summarize the steps to run pydrake on a windows machine with similar experience on an Ubuntu machine.

Step 1: Get WSL2

Hold winkey (the key between Ctrl and Alt), type Turn Windows Features on or off and open, tick Windows subsystem for Linux.
Install Ubuntu 20.04 version from Microsoft Store.
Retart and configure your Ubuntu (wsl).
(Optional) Check out “VMMEM 100% CPU Usage Issue” to avoid burning down you PC by disabling the GUI feature.

4.1. winkey+R, type in %USERPROFILE%

4.2. create a new file named .wslconfig with content [wsl2] guiApplications=false

4.3. restart wsl by opening a cmd.exe with admin privilege running command wsl --shutdown see https://x410.dev/cookbook/wsl/disabling-wslg-or-using-it-together-with-x410/

Step 2: Get VS Code

In VS Code, install the extension named “WSL”. It allows you to work with a terminal as if you are on an Ubuntu machine.

Step 3: Get Python (and miniconda)

The package management software conda makes things easier for newbies, and we will install miniconda

mkdir -p ~/miniconda3 wget was unable to establish SSL connection so I manually go to https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh and download miniconda for linux bash ~/miniconda3/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh -b -u -p ~/miniconda3 ~/miniconda3/bin/conda init bash

Step 4: Install drake.

https://drake.mit.edu/pydrake/pydrake.tutorials.html https://drake.mit.edu/python_bindings.html#using-the-python-bindings

My steps for reference (using miniconda):


pip install drake underactuated notebook ipywidgets

My steps for reference (using venv, not recommended anymore):


# ON WSL2 Ubuntu 20.04
 
# get rid of the old python3 (mine is a python3.8)
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge
sudo apt-get remove python3
sudo apt-get autoremove
 
# get 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3
sudo apt install python3-pip
sudo apt install python3.8-venv
 
python3 -m venv main2 # this will create a folder named "./main2" in the current directory "."
# source main3/bin/activate # use this to activate the virtual env
 
main2/bin/pip install --upgrade pip # drake requires pip version > 20.3
main2/bin/pip install drake
main2/bin/pip install underactuated
main2/bin/pip install notebook
main2/bin/pip install ipywidgets
 
main2/bin/python3 -m pydrake.tutorials
  # this gives: ERROR: the Jupyter notebook runtime is not installed!
  # but you can now run ipynb files from the course companion codes.
 
  # http://localhost:7000/

Step 5: Go through official tutorials

I personally like cartpole_urdf.ipynb, cartpole_balancing.ipynb, and authoring_multibody_simulaiton.py the most.

Other related Links:

Lectures by Zhang, Wei @ SUSTech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HpUZU6Zlqw

Finger manipulating a box:

https://medium.com/@berk9848/drake-first-tutorial-275042d145b4

Examples from underactuated chapter 3:

https://deepnote.com/app/zhongqi-wei/Ch-3-Acrobots-Cart-Poles-and-Quadrotors-Duplicate-b398742d-b8c6-4604-a80e-2e0627ff0f76

Drake (the Cpp version of CartPole LQR):

https://drake.guzhaoyuan.com/drake-controllers/lqr-on-cart-pole

More cartpoles:

https://github.com/robotics-laboratory/cart-pole

https://cartpole.robotics-lab.ru/3.0.0/dynamics/

https://www.youtube.com/@robotics_lab/videos

Fish robot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNmSqHzHQXg