The base code implements the planar linkage kinematics in linkage.py, and the linkage can be installed on a robot and simulate to test the robot performance using linkage_physics.py. Finally, we implemented a basic linkage optimizer using simulated annealing in optimizer_anneal.py.
The code has been tested on Python 3.6 and 3.12.
To run the code, you first need to install Anaconda, which can be downloaded from https://docs.anaconda.com/anaconda/install/
Once Anaconda is installed, you can open the anaconda and type the following commands in order:
- now, you can create your conda environment, named "box2d-py"
conda create -n box2d-py
- remember every time you activate the environment, before you use it.
conda activate box2d-py
- once you activate the environment for the first time, you need to install the following packages.
conda install conda-forge::box2d-py (box2d-py (https://github.com/pybox2d/pybox2d). Fortunately, you can install it via Anaconda.)
pip install pygame
pip install numpy
pip install vapory
- run the Python scripts one by one
python linkage.py
python optimizer_anneal.py
python linkage_physics.py
To run linkage_physics.py, you need the 'best.pickle' file that contains the design from optimizer_anneal.py. That said, before you run optimizer_anneal.py, you do not have it yet.
If you want to simply test the linkage_physics.py, instead, you can replace
robot=create_robot('best.pickle', sep=5.)
with
link=Linkage.createSimple()
robot=create_robot(link, sep=5.)
Once you run linkage_physics.py, you can control the robots via
press 'SPACE' to turn on/off simulation
press 'RCTRL' to turn on/off robot motor
On windows, the default povray does not work. We need a special version of povray that is independently compiled called MegaPov.
I have included a version of this MegaPov in the project, i.e., the megapov.rar. To enable povray on windows, unzip this folder to any directory.
Let's say you have a povray.exe located in "C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\POV-Ray\bin".
After this step, you need to add this to your system path as follows:
Now you can press "LSHIFT" in the window to have the povray render a nice image for you, an example is as follows:
To help you share the result you are most proud of, when you call function main_linkage_physics, you can pass the parameter recordTime=10 to record a 10-second animation as follows:
