Documentation > Compiling

Compiling

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How can I build and use GPU-Voxels?

The environment

  • The software is an interchangeable library (ICL) running within FZIs ic_workspace. “ic” means it can run in whatever environment, e.g. as a ROS-node, as a MCA-module or as a standalone program.
  • ICLs are made to be platform independent. Therefore it should be possible to run gpu-voxels natively on the Mac. We never tried though…
  • We build it with FZIs icmaker, which is a comfort layer on top of cmake, comparable to ROS catkin
  • gpu_voxels depends on the basic library icl_core (OS independent comfort layer that implements logging, config, …) which is delivered with the code.
  • There are many more ICLs, making autonomous cars drive, Mars rovers explore, walking machines walk… Some of them will become OpenSource sooner or later.

The build process

  1. Install the required libraries and make sure that CUDA and its nvcc is correctly installed.
  2. Clone the software from GitHub into a directory of your choice.
  3. Change into the directory and create a build folder: mkdir build
  4. Change into the build folder and run cmake: cd build && cmake ..
    A successfull cmake run should contain a section like this:

    hermann-local@ids-isabel-2:~/src/ic_workspace_open_source/build$ cmake ..
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- ------------------------ GPU Voxels configuration ------------------------
--
-- [OK]      Building GPU-Voxels. Found CUDA.
-- [OK]      Building GPU-Voxels with visualization. GLEW, GLM, OpenGL and GLUT were found.
-- [OK]      Building GPU-Voxels with URDF support. urdfdom, orocos and kdl_parser were found.
-- [OK]      Building GPU-Voxels with ROS connections. ROS was found.
-- [OK]      Building GPU-Voxels with Kinect support. OpenNI was found.
-- [OK]      Building GPU-Voxels with Octomap support. Octomap found.
-- [OK]      Building GPU-Voxels with PCL interfaces. PCL found.
--
-- -------------------- END of GPU Voxels configuration ---------------------
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------------

     

  5. Start compilation: make (or if you have some more cores make -j9)

Feel free to use ninja for the build. We experienced no problems with that.
To switch between Debug and Release builds, use cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=[Release/Debug/RelWithDebInfo]

==> After installing the libs, continue with starting an example.

Troubleshooting

  • No build targets are generated by cmake? ==> Read the output of cmake and search for missing dependencies.
  • You see some warnings during the build process? ==> Don’t worry, many of them are irrelevant. Please create an issue on GitHub if you notice something unexpected related to the build.
  • Problems with GLM while building the Visualizer? ==> Most probably you will have to patch one file: See https://github.com/g-truc/glm/issues/530