April Robotics Toolkit

Installation

These instructions are tested against Ubuntu 10.04. (and Ubuntu 11.04)

  1. Install necessary packages

     apt-get install emacs git-core ant subversion gtk-doc-tools libglib2.0-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev gv libncurses-dev openjdk-6-jdk autopoint libgl1-mesa-dev libpng12-dev libdc1394-22-dev

  2. Install LCM

     cd $HOME
 git clone https://code.google.com/p/lcm lcm
 cd lcm
 ./bootstrap.sh
 ./configure
 make
 sudo make install

  3. Set up environment variables

    Add the following lines to .bashrc

     export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/usr/share/java/gluegen-rt.jar:/usr/local/share/java/lcm.jar:$HOME/april/java/april.jar:./
 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/april/lib
 alias java='java -ea -server'

    Then reload your bash settings (you won’t need to do this the next time you log in):

     source ~/.bashrc

  4. Install April Toolkit

     cd $HOME
 git clone git://april.eecs.umich.edu/home/git/april.git
 cd april/src
 make all
 cd $HOME
 cd april/java
 ant

  5. Take it for a spin!

    You can test the 3D visualization environment with:

     java april.vis.VisTest

    Or try out the camera acquisition software with:

     java april.jcam.JCamView

But I just need the basic Java support. Isn’t there an easier way?

For a minimum configuration, without support for cameras or Vis (i.e., you might be on a platform for which these are not supported), you must still install LCM first. But then you can build the april.jar file without any addition fuss with:

ant build-jar

Naturally, if you try to run any application that requires native code, it will unceremoniously crash.

Troubleshooting