Real robot

There are two real-robot spines: the mock spine, and the pi3hat spine.

Mock spine

The mock spine is useful to run an agent on the robot without firing up the actuators. It works exactly as the pi3hat spine, replacing "pi3hat" with "mock" in all instructions.

Pi3hat spine

The pi3hat spine is the one that runs on the real robot, where a pi3hat r4.5 is mounted on top of the onboard Raspberry Pi computer. To run this spine, you can either download it from GitHub, or build it locally from source.

Download the latest release

Assuming your robot is connected to the Internet, you can get the latest pi3hat spine from GitHub using the upkie_tool command-line utility:

$ ssh user@upkie
user@upkie:~$ upkie_tool update

Alternatively, you can manually go to the Release page, download pi3hat_spine from the Assets of the latest release and scp it to the /usr/local/bin directory of your robot.

Once the spine is installed, start it from a command-line on the robot:

user@upkie:~$ pi3hat_spine

You can then run any agent in a separate shell on the robot, for example the PID balancer from the examples directory:

user@upkie:upkie$ python examples/pi_balancer.py

Build from source

If your operating system is a Debian-based Linux distribution like Ubuntu 20.04, you will need to install the following dependency (also discussed in #42):

sudo apt install libtinfo5  # only needed for Debian-based Linux distributions

To build the pi3hat spine locally from source, use the Makefile at the root of the repository as follows:

make build

Make sure there is no error during this step. It should conclude with a success info, like so:

INFO: Build completed successfully, 1 total action

Next, you can upload the built spine to your robot by:

make upload UPKIE_NAME=your_upkie

Log into the Pi and run a pi3hat spine:

$ ssh user@upkie
user@upkie:~$ cd upkie
user@upkie:upkie$ make run_pi3hat_spine

Once the spine is running, you can run any agent in a separate shell on the robot, for example the PID balancer from the examples directory:

user@upkie:upkie$ python examples/pi_balancer.py