Setup

Installing or adding MPPI-Generic to your project

Installation of MPPI-Generic

On this page, we will try to give you a quick run-down on how to run MPPI-Generic on your own system.

Prerequisites for installation

MPPI-Generic relies on the following:

An NVIDIA GPU
GCC/G++
CUDA 10 or newer (CUDA 11.7+ is recommended but our library is compatible back to CUDA 10)
Eigen
CMake 3.10 or newer
git and git-lfs

Unit tests requirements

yaml-cpp
python-pil

Prerequisite setup (Ubuntu)

Follow the instructions to install CUDA provided here.

Install all the other prerequisites through apt-get:

sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev libyaml-cpp-dev git git-lfs cmake gcc
git lfs install
# extra installs if you are wanting to build unit tests
sudo apt-get install libyaml-cpp-dev python3-pil

Using MPPI-Generic as a git submodule

As MPPI-Generic is still developing its API, our recommended way to incorporate this library into your projects is through git submodule. Git submodules allow you to keep track of specific commits of other projects so you can ensure that your code will not break when the API is updated. Setting up a git submodule is rather straightforward.

The following adds the MPPI-Generic codebase under a submodules/MPPI-Generic folder in your desired project.

cd /path/to/project-root
mkdir -p submodules
git submodule add https://github.com/ACDSLab/MPPI-Generic.git submodules/MPPI-Generic

We now modify the root CMakeLists.txt of your project to add MPPI-Generic as a library your code can link to. Note that this is a header-only library written in CUDA, so your executables/libraries will need to be *.cu files for the correct compiler to be used. First, we will modify the languages your CMake project uses to add C++/CUDA support.
```
project(YOUR_PROJECT_NAME LANGUAGES CXX CUDA)
```

Next, we add our CMake module configuration that sets up compilation flags such as which NVIDIA GPU architecture to compile for. After that, we add MPPI-Generic as a subdirectory and it is now ready for use.

set(CMAKE_MODULE_PATH "${CMAKE_MODULE_PATH}" "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/submodules/MPPI-Generic")
include(MPPIGenericToolsConfig)
add_subdirectory(${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/submodules/MPPI-Generic)

Adding MPPI-Generic to your target in CMake just requires linking to the MPPI::MPPI template library.
```
add_executable(test_executable test.cu)
target_link_libraries(test_executable MPPI::MPPI)
```

Installing MPPI-Generic

If you want to use MPPI-Generic as a stand-alone library, we recommend cloning the git repo:

git clone https://github.com/ACDSLab/MPPI-Generic.git
cd MPPI-Generic
git submodule update --init --recursive
mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/.local ..
make && make install

You now have the MPPI-Generic library!

Build examples

From the root directory of the MPPI-Generic repo:

mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake -DMPPI_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON .. # configure cmake to build examples
make
cd examples

In the examples folder, you will find multiple example programs using MPPI that should run such as cartpole_example.

./cartpole_example

Build unit tests

From the root directory of the MPPI-Generic repo:

mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake -DMPPI_BUILD_TESTS=ON .. # configure cmake to build tests
make

You can then run the unit tests with:

make test