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MAP-Elites Hexapod Experiments

Sferes2 experiment: MAP-Elites code for developing hexapod experiments similar to Cully et al. (2015), Nature. This code is not replicating the exact experiments of the Nature paper, but can be seen as a more modern implementation of the underlying algorithm.

Citing this code

If you use our code for a scientific paper, please cite:

Antoine Cully, Jeff Clune, Danesh Tarapore, and Jean-Baptiste Mouret. "Robots that can adapt like animals." Nature 521, no. 7553 (2015): 503-507.

In BibTex:

@article{cully_robots_2015,
    title = {Robots that can adapt like animals},
    volume = {521},
    pages = {503--507},
    number = {7553},
    journal = {Nature},
    author = {Cully, Antoine and Clune, Jeff and Tarapore, Danesh and Mouret, Jean-Baptiste},
    year = {2015}
}

Authors

• Author/Maintainer: Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis
• Other contributors: Vassilis Vassiliades, Jean-Baptiste Mouret

How to compile

Dependencies

Setting up the ResiBots environment

We use the environmental RESIBOTS_DIR variable for easy configuration and library finding (it basically points to one folder where every local installation happens that is related to the project). Thus, before installing/compiling anything, make sure that you add this line to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc file:

export RESIBOTS_DIR=/path/to/resibots/installation/folder

From now on, we assume that the RESIBOTS_DIR variable is set.

Installing DART

To simulate our hexapod we are using the DART simulator. To install use the following procedure:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:libccd-debs/ppa
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:fcl-debs/ppa
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:dartsim/ppa
sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake pkg-config git
sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev libassimp-dev libccd-dev libfcl-dev libboost-regex-dev libboost-system-dev libode-dev
sudo apt-get install libopenscenegraph-dev

sudo apt-get install libtinyxml-dev libtinyxml2-dev
sudo apt-get install liburdfdom-dev liburdfdom-headers-dev

cd /path/to/tmp/folder
git clone git://github.com/dartsim/dart.git
cd dart
git checkout v6.3.0

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DDART_ENABLE_SIMD=ON ..
make -j4
sudo make install

Installing the hexapod common files

In order to simulate the hexapod you nead to get the URDF file and the controller library:

cd /path/to/tmp/folder
git clone https://github.com/resibots/hexapod_common.git
cd hexapod_common/hexapod_models
./waf configure --prefix=$RESIBOTS_DIR
./waf install
cd ../hexapod_controller
./waf configure --prefix=$RESIBOTS_DIR
./waf
./waf install

Installing the DART wrapper

To facilitate the simulation we have created a simple wrapper over the DART simulator that is specific to our hexapod robot:

cd /path/to/tmp/folder
git clone https://github.com/resibots/hexapod_simu.git
cd hexapod_simu/hexapod_dart
./waf configure --prefix=$RESIBOTS_DIR
./waf
./waf install

Installing sferes's dependencies

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev libboost-serialization-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-test-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-regex-dev libboost-graph-dev
sudo apt-get install libtbb-dev

Compiling the experiment

• Get Sferes2: git clone https://github.com/sferes2/sferes2.git
• Go to your sferes2 root directory
• Go to the modules folder: cd modules
• Get the map elites module: git clone https://github.com/sferes2/map_elites.git
  • Add map_elites to your modules.conf file in the sferes folder
• Go back to your sferes directory
• Configure for compilation: ./waf configure
  • You can add other options if you want, like: --cpp14=yes to force C++14 compilation
• Compile sferes2 with: ./waf
• Create an experiment folder (if there's none) and cd to it: mkdir exp && cd exp
• Clone map_elites_hexapod_v2: git clone https://github.com/resibots/map_elites_hexapod_v2.git
• Go back to your sferes2 root directory
• Configure the experiment: ./waf configure --exp map_elites_hexapod_v2
• Compile the experiment: ./waf --exp map_elites_hexapod_v2

How to run

• Compile the experiment (as shown above)
• Run it (assuming you are on sferes2 root dir and the RESIBOTS_DIR folder is set properly):
  • ./build/exp/map_elites_hexapod_v2/hexa_duty_text for text archives
  • ./build/exp/map_elites_hexapod_v2/hexa_duty_binary for binary archives

Funding

This work has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 637972 - ResiBots).

LICENSE

CeCILL