A decent machine is required (typically, with an Intel i5 + 4GB RAM, you should be comfortable).
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:
If you do not need cameras and OpenGL textures/shaders, you are advised to run your simulation in fastmode (refer to the simulation’s Builder API) for vastly improved loading time and performances.
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 officially support Microsoft Windows, although some users reported success. Testers/maintainers for Windows are welcome!
morse-1.0 is available on Debian Wheezy/Ubuntu >= 13.04. You can install the package morse-simulator with your favorite software manager:
$ sudo apt-get install morse-simulator
You can also install the Python bindings with:
$ sudo apt-get install python3-morse-simulator
You can also easily install MORSE with:
See their associated documentation for details.
If you plan to use the simulator with raw sockets or text files as interface (for instance, to integrate MORSE with MatLab or other specific applications), you don’t need anything else. Otherwise, you need to install the software for the desired 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:
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.
Note
If you decide to install Python 3.2 by hand, the compilation must be done according to your operating system, to match the Python compiled in Blender:
It the unicode sizes between Python and Blender do not match, you will get errors about undefined symbols with names starting with PyUnicodeUCS4
This is not needed for Python >= 3.3 (Blender >= 2.65) anymore.
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 (1.0) of Morse, you can get it in the branch 1.0_STABLE. You can get it directly using
$ git clone https://github.com/laas/morse.git -b 1.0_STABLE
or if you have already download the repository
$ git checkout -b 1.0_STABLE -t origin/1.0_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.
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 -DPYTHON_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
In case of problems installing MORSE, verify the list of Frequently Asked Questions.