TriFinger Apptainer/Singularity Images

Apptainer definition files related to the TriFinger project.

Get Pre-Build Containers

You can pull pre-build containers directly with apptainer. For example for the latest trifinger_user container:

apptainer pull oras://ghcr.io/open-dynamic-robot-initiative/trifinger_singularity/trifinger_user:latest

Simply adjust the name and tag at the end accordingly for the other containers.

Build Containers Yourself

Requirements

For building the base images only a recent version of Singularity or Apptainer and an internet connection is required.

For building the images containing the TriFinger software (trifinger_user and trifinger_robot) the following applications are required in addition:

• git
• treep

Further you will need a GitHub account with an SSH key set up, otherwise cloning the repositories via treep will not work.

General: Building Images

To build a specific image (let's say trifinger_base.sif), simply call:

make trifinger_base.sif

Note that for some images, treep is used to clone the TriFinger packages. This requires that a SSH key is set up for git and activated (e.g. via ssh-add).

There are two different clean targets:

make clean

deletes all intermediate build files like definition files that are based on templates or the workspace directory with the source packages. It does not delete the built images (*.sif).

make clean_sif

deletes all images built by this Makefile.

Images in this Repository

This repository contains definition files for the following images. They are based on each other, so usually one image just extends the previous one with additional functionality.

• trifinger_base: All dependencies to build/run the ROBOT_FINGERS project.
• trifinger_base_pylon: Adds Pylon SDK to trifinger_base.
• trifinger_{user,robot}: The ROBOT_FINGERS project packages are installed in this image, so they don't need to be built manually. The "user"-version uses a normal build, "robot" one for real-time systems.
• solo_bolt_{user,robot}: Same as above but with the software packages for the Solo and Bolt robots.

Below follows a more detailed description of the separate images.

Image "trifinger_base"

Build with:

make trifinger_base.sif

This image, defined in trifinger_base.def, provides the environment to build and run the code from the ROBOT_FINGERS treep project.

Inside the container is a file /setup.bash which needs to be sourced to set up the environment for building/running the code.

So to build the workspace and run things with the container do

cd path/to/your_workspace
singularity shell --nv path/to/trifinger_base.sif
. /setup.bash
colcon build

# source the workspace
. install/local_setup.bash
ros2 run <package_name> <executable_name>

Image "trifinger_base_pylon"

Build with:

make trifinger_base_pylon.sif

Adds the Pylon SDK to the base image. This is needed for building the camera drivers for the TriFinger robots.

The license of Pylon can be found in /opt/pylon5/share/pylon/License.html inside this image. You may only use it if you accept its license.

Images "trifinger_user"/"trifinger_robot"

Build with:

make trifinger_user.sif
make trifinger_robot.sif

Both images are based on the same definition template trifinger.def but using different build arguments. They both extend the base image by adding a pre-built ROBOT_FINGERS workspace. This is meant for users of the robot who want to run applications from the robot packages or build their own applications depending on them but who do not need to modify the core packages.

The "user" image uses a non-real-time build and is thus only suitable for running the simulation or applications using the robot front end with multi-process time series.

The "robot" image includes Pylon and is built for the real-time system. It can be used to run the robot backend but requires user permissions to launch real-time threads.

When building, the project source is cloned to the directory ./build and copied from there to the image. Note that once cloned, the local workspace is not updated automatically when rebuilding the image! To make sure you have the latest version of the code, run make clean first.

Images "solo_bolt_user"/"solo_bolt_robot"

Same as above but including the software packages for the Solo and Bolt robots instead of the TriFinger.