Grasp simulation tool - grasp

I want to do some grasp motion planning experiments, but I failed with compiling the GraspIt! using VS2010 on Win7. Is there has other grasp simulation tool like GraspIt! that can be used in Win7 and VS2010 environment? Thank you!

I had been trying to install Graspit for Windows 7 too, but failed somehow and then switched to OpenRAVE. OpenRAVE is open source and provides an environment for testing, developing, and deploying motion planning algorithms in real-world robotics applications. The installation guide for Windows can be found here. There are a lot of quick start examples, which cover topics to help you get started with Inverse kinematics, testing a grasp, implementing planners and controllers. You could also work in a MATLAB, Octave or Python interface.
You can also find lots of relevant information on the OpenRAVE user mailing list, or ask questions when you need help.
I am running OpenRAVE on Ubuntu 12.04 though, and the installation was fairly easy.

Related

Run Chaos Monkey locally on mac

I was trying to setup chaos monkey locally on my mac. Couldn't find much documentations regarding this. The official docs are incomplete/ or in progress. I'm new to chaos engineering and have never worked with the simian army tools.
I was able to find a lot of guides to install chaos-monkey on distribution platforms. But couldn't find any useful documentation for doing the same on a local system to test.
I'm aware that I'll need spinnaker and mysql set up for it to run.
I was thinking of installing spinnaker on a local kubernetes cluster and then try configuring that to set up chaos-monkey. I found this guide to do the same. But ended up overloading my mac (has 8GB ram) and it shut down.
Also tried setting up spinnaker on docker using this guide, but ran into some version issues.
Is there any other memory efficient way to install chaos_monkey locally and use it to attack kubernetes nodes or even VMs? I'm aware of kube-monkey, but that's not what I'm trying to test here.
Any suggestions on how to set this up locally are also welcome.
I ran into this same problem around Chaos Monkey a couple of years ago. The setup is complex enough that finding foolproof steps is a little challenging. Here's a comprehensive guide that is useful: https://www.gremlin.com/chaos-monkey/chaos-monkey-tutorial/
As an alternative, Gremlin's Free Product isn't open source, but gives you Chaos Monkey / shutdown functionality with a very simple install process. gremlin.com/gremlin-free-software.

How to integrate OpenNI, NITE libraries in CodeBlocks or Geany

I installed the OpenNI+NITE+kinect on ubuntu 12.10 today and the samples are working fine. (Ran NITE samples and they work like charm)
I want to start developing in Linux and I like to work with IDE. For ubuntu I have always used Geany or Codeblocks and i was wondering if there was a way to integrate OpenNI,NITE libraries to the IDE's so that I can write, execute, debug the code easily from the IDE itself.
I tried to add the libraries myself in geany but all my attempts failed. :/
Also, when I do make for Sample examples in OpenNI, I get *.d and *.o files but I dont seem to get the executable *.out . So i am not sure how to run the programs.
I am a novice programmer, just starting to learn, So please excuse the noobness in
questions.
Appreciate the Help.
Thanks
Generally if you're doing something non-trivial with Geany you will need to provide your own build system (even simple GNU Make files will do). Geany is intentionally build system agnostic and allows you to run arbitrary build commands which are described in the manual as well as in a helpful article on the wiki.
If you describe in more detail the errors/problems you referred to as "attempts failed" it will likely be possible to provide more concrete solutions.

OSX + VB.Net, briefly what's required to port my program from windows, perhaps by mono?

I have an order entry system which was developed using vb.net it uses an ms access database.
I think I might be able to use mono?
I'll need an IDE if possible.
Can someone tell me what I'll to download and what problems I might face, also any suggestions.
You can use MoMA to determine how well your application will run on Mono. It will analyze the app and tell you of any potential compatibility issues. As far as IDE goes, MonoDevelop would work, but depending on the compatibility with Mono, you might be able to just continue to develop it on Windows. Since Mono is just an implementation of the CLR you may not have to make any code changes at all.
Mono supports ODBC for database connections, but you would have to install an ODBC driver (Such as MDB Tools).
I think I might be able to use mono?
Porting applications can be tricky, generally it can go two ways:
- Get it running with minor tweaks.
- Stop trying and start developing from scratch.
MoMA helps, but you never know for sure until you try :)
Checkout MonoDevelop for Mac OSX:
http://monodevelop.com/

Wanted: user experiences with C# (mono) on MacOS and Linux

I have a friend who is was a serious Linux developer but now he's working with C# on Windows and is really loving it. I'm attracted to C# because, like Java, I should be able to compile on one system and run anywhere.
If you are developing on Windows with C#, you're using dot-Net. On Linux and MacOS, you're using Mono.
Other people have posted that Mono is pretty good, no longer a science project, and that most of the core Microsoft functionality is present. But that's not really getting at the questions that I have. I'm wondering:
How does performance of Mono on Linux/MacOS rate against Java? If I want to run fast on all three platforms with the same object code, what's my best choice?
Is it easy/possible/reasonable to use Mono with makefiles and do my development with emacs?
Is there support for code factoring in MacOS and Linux, or am I better off just biting the bullet and doing all of my development in Windows?
How well does Mono work with Subversion and the rest of the open source development stack? How about autoconf? Or is this a completely different way of doing things?
Thanks
I have been using Mono on Linux for about three years and lately have been using it on OS X. Some of the Linux stuff was pretty extensive but the OS X stuff has just been some simple ASP.NET MVC2 apps so far.
1) Performance of Mono has never been an issue for me. That is not to say that performance has not been important, it is just that the performance of Mono itself has never been an issue. A lot of what I have done is web based so I/O and database memory use have hit me before Mono has.
Historically, the biggest deficiency with Mono has been the Garbage Collector (GC). I would say that Java is better tuned in this regard. The most recent versions of Mono have made huge strides in this area but I do not have any hard numbers for you in terms of comparisons.
I am sure Mono is faster sometimes and Java sometimes but I would say that Java is faster overall.
2) You can certainly do Mono development with makefiles. Certainly the Mono team itself does. Also you can certainly use Emacs and there is a C# mode for it.
I tend to use MonoDevelop and xbuild (Mono version of msbuild) myself and do not have any experience doing C# work in Emacs. MonoDevelop is great because it is exactly the same on all platforms. Also, although I rarely use it anymore, it is nice that the project format is the same as Visual Studio and SharpDevelop.
3) MonoDevelop has pretty decent code factoring support. It is the same on Windows, Linux, and Mac. You do not need to use Windows for development (though you certainly can) but I believe you will be happier using an IDE like MonoDevelop. Even things like Intellisense become hard to live without once you are used to them. But integrated debugging, being able to drill-down into the framework, database integration, unit testing, SCM integration, and other nice tooling support all in one place is just the way to go (for me at least).
4) Mono itself does not care about version control of course. Your source files are just text and you could use anything to manage them.
That said, MonoDevelop has fantastic Subversion support built right into the IDE. I have used it extensively and it is one of the reasons I have trouble moving off MonoDevelop even on Windows. The latest version of MonoDevelop (2.6 beta) includes Git support as well.
You did not mention unit testing but MonoDevelop also has NUnit support built into the IDE. I use that on every project as well and it works excellently. The version in MonoDevelop is 2.4.8 (if memory serves) so it is not quite current but it works great.
In a nutshell, Mono works really well with Open Source tooling in general. It has always played really well for me.
Autoconf is of course used by the Mono project itself but, as a Mono developer, I have never seen a need for it. I strive to only use managed code in my projects. As such, all I need on the target platform is Mono (or .NET). Not having to worry about all that stuff is one of the primary benefits of a managed environment like Mono or Java. The runtime itself (the CLR) ensures that my app has everything it needs to function properly.
I know that MonoDevelop will build autoconf/autorun files for C/C++ projects (non-Mono) but I have not done much with it myself.
As to a previous comment, the Mono JIT is obviously tuned to the target platform. That is where platform specific performance tuning happens.
Just as a comment, I find that Mono is best viewed as a development environment in it's own right rather than a compatibility layer for Microsoft stuff. The Mono team has extended .NET in many interesting ways. Anything you develop for Mono will run on .NET but there are some .NET features not available for Mono. For example, Mono does not support Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). You have to use Windows Forms or GTK# for cross-platform GUI work. You can also use something like Cocoa# or MonoMac on the Mac, MonoTouch on iPhone, or MonoDroid for Android. You can use Moonlight instead of Silverlight as well although I have not played with it much.
One more thing since you asked about Java. I have found a few times that the Java world had libraries that I could not find equivalents for in the .NET world. In these cases, I have had amazing luck using IKVM.NET to integrate this into my Mono apps. IKVM.NET also works on .NET but Mono and IKVM.NET are very cozy and even share some code.
So there you go, one real answer for you at least.

Can I code for Visual C++ and Visual Basic on Ubuntu?

I want to change my OS to Ubuntu, but I have pending projects in Visual C++ and Visual Basic.
I have not worked with Ubuntu before, so will I be able to carry forward my pending work to Ubuntu? Will it work with the IDEs available in Ubuntu?
IDEs on Linux are generally for projects that work on Linux. If your projects use anything specific to MS (and Visual Basic is one such thing), you won't be able to work on them under Linux-specific IDEs. Even your C++ code might be using many Windows-specific tools, like MFC, C++/CLI or managed extensions, COM... Windows has lots of non-standard, non-portable things. So, answering your question: probably no.
You can install Visual Studio under Linux with Wine, but it will probably be an unpleasant experience: Visual Studio is a big application that strongly integrates with Windows, and Wine might not be able to emulate Windows well enough.
I would advice you to keep Windows until your work on these projects will be finished, dual-boot (install Ubuntu on another partition and boot it when you don't need to work on your projects) or install Windows in a virtual machine inside Linux (f.e. using VMWare Player or VirtualBox). I chose last option and with VMWare it is good enough for me.
The best options would be:
to use the wine emulator;
to install windows in a virtual machine (with VirtualBox);
to use MonoDevelop.
If those projects are targeted at Windows deployment, then you really ought to be developing them, or at least testing them, on Windows. That said, you could use a virtual machine to keep running Windows for work on those projects, and use Ubuntu otherwise.
If you decide to do this, I can't recommend making backups (plural!) highly enough before starting, in case you need to back out.
You can use WINE and run Visual Studio's on Ubuntu, the best option before a total conversion is to dual boot between windows and linux.
Visual C++: maybe. Depends on what kind of project it is. If it doesn't involve GUIs or MS-specific technologies like COM, .NET and company, you can probably port it with a minimum of effort. If it involves GUIs and/or MS-specific technologies, no it won't be portable.
Visual Basic: There is REALBasic which is claimed to be "like Visual Basic", but I'm rather dubious of its compatibility. (Whenever I see the words "migration tool" I get very nervous.)
That being said, you don't have to leave Windows completely behind these days. You can run WINE (if you really like pain -- I've never had WINE accomplish anything useful), or you can dual-boot or you can use something like VirtualBox to run Windows under Linux, all depending on your available resources and inclinations.
Sounds like you did not try it out: it won't work even with WINE it'll be a pain. To try out what will work or not install a virtual machine with Ubuntu as an OS under your current OS. YOu will be able to test things without breaking something.
I would suggest looking at the Mingw32 system. I have had excellent luck compiling Win32 applications (in C and C++) on a Linux system. So long as you're using the public Win32 API (basically, anything in windows.h), Mingw32 is a reasonably good choice.
You will probably not be able to use your Visual Studio solutions in Linux. Linux tends to avoid IDEs in favor of a system called Autotools. Having used both for many years, I have to say that on balance I prefer Autotools.
There is a steep learning curve involved in Autotools, but I feel the payoff is worth it. Good luck!