MORSE installation

Requirements - What you need to install before

Hardware

To display textures correctly in the simulator, as well as to generate images using the simulated cameras, you will need to have a graphics card that supports GLSL shading. The Blender website lists these graphic cards as compatible with GLSL:

  • ATI Radeon 9x00, Xx00, X1x00, HD2x00 and HD3x00 series and newer.
  • NVidia Geforce FX, 6x00, 7x00, 8x00, 9x00 and GTX 2x0 and newer.

Supported operating systems

Only Linux (x86, x86_64) is currently officially supported. MORSE is mainly developed on Fedora and Ubuntu, but we don’t expect problems on other distributions.

Other UNIXes systems probably work as well (like FreeBSD or Apple MacOSX).

MORSE does not currently support Microsoft Windows, although it may work (testers/maintainers for Windows are welcome!).

Required software

  • Python (3.2 or +) On Linux: compiled with the --with-wide-unicode flag
  • Python-dev package (if installing from a repository)
  • Blender (>= 2.59 & < 2.62) build with Python 3.2
  • MORSE source code

Note

If you install Python by hand, the compilation must be done according to your operating system, to match the Python compiled in Blender:

  • On Linux compile with the --with-wide-unicode flag. This will provide you with 4-byte Unicode characters (max size: 1114111)
  • On Mac OS do not use the --with-wide-unicode flag. This will provide you with 2-byte Unicode characters (max size: 65535)

It the unicode sizes between Python and Blender do not match, you will get errors about undefined symbols with names starting with PyUnicodeUCS4

If you plan to use the simulator with raw sockets of text files as “middleware”, you don’t need anything else. Otherwise, you need to install the software for other middlewares:

If you want to distribute your simulation in a multinode infrastructure, MORSE provides by default a socket service for multinode synchronization. If you want to use HLA, you have to first install the CERTI and PyHLA packages:

Installation

Note

The directory where MORSE is installed will be referred to as $MORSE_ROOT in this document.

It is recommended to store this environment variable, as it is necessary to use the Builder API scripts to generate simulation scenes with custom equipped robots.

Manually

Download the latest version of the source code. It is stored in a git repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/laas/morse.git

If you want to get only the latest stable version (0.5) of Morse, you can get it in the branch 0.5_STABLE. You can get it directly using

$ git clone https://github.com/laas/morse.git -b 0.5_STABLE

or if you have already download the repository

$ git checkout -b 0.5_STABLE -t origin/0.5_STABLE

You can get a tarball version here.

Go to the directory where you have previously downloaded the MORSE source. Then type these commands:

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..

By default, MORSE will install in /usr/local. You can easily change the install directory by giving additional parameters to cmake. You can also change the installation type and select the middleware bindings by using these additional parameters.

  • CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX controls where will be installed MORSE. The install prefix directory is referred to as $MORSE_ROOT.
  • BUILD_CORE_SUPPORT controls the builds and install of Morse core. It is ON by default
  • BUILD_DOC_SUPPORT controls the build of the documentation (require sphinx)
  • BUILD_HLA_SUPPORT controls the builds of HLA support for multi-node simulations in MORSE.
  • BUILD_POCOLIBS_SUPPORT controls the build of pocolibs support in MORSE.
  • BUILD_YARP2_SUPPORT controls the build of YARP support in MORSE.
  • BUILD_ROS_SUPPORT controls the build of ROS support in MORSE.
  • BUILD_MOOS_SUPPORT controls the build of MOOS support in MORSE.
  • PYMORSE_SUPPORT controls the build and installation of pymorse, a library to interact with Morse through the socket interface. It is needed for test infrastructure.
  • CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE controls the optimization stuff for C/C++ extension (Release is a good choice).
  • PYTHON3_EXECUTABLE indicate where the python3 executable is in your system
  • PYTHON_EXECUTABLE indicate where the python2 executable is in your system

You can set up the different variables using the command line. For instance, to build and install MORSE with YARP support in /opt, you need something like:

$ cmake -DBUILD_YARP2_SUPPORT=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt ..

Or to tell MORSE where to find a Python installed in a different location:

$ cmake -DPYTHON3_EXECUTABLE=/usr/local/bin/python3.2 ..

Alternatively, you can use ccmake .. to change all of these parameters using a graphical interface. You can modify many different variables by switching to “advanced mode” (pressing the t key).

After configuring the necessary parameters, compile with:

$ sudo make install

The optional $MORSE_BLENDER environment variable can be set to let the simulator know where to look for Blender if it is not accessible from the path.

You can check your configuration is ok with:

$ morse check

Note

When updating MORSE to a more recent version, you’ll simply have to do:

$ git checkout [version]
$ cd build
$ make install

Packages manager

MORSE is available through some package manager. See their associated documentation.

Installation troubleshooting

In case of problems installing MORSE, verify the list of Frequently Asked Questions.