Chain Control (cc)

This package provides components to

• simulate kinematic chains
• define and train a model of the dynamics
• define and train a controller that tracks a reference with the help of a model
• visualize the controller performance

A key concept is that models but also controllers are neural ODEs that are trained using gradient descent.

Installation

Make sure that you first fulfill the following dependencies

• Requirements of dm_control under Rendering (https://github.com/deepmind/dm_control)
• RecordVideoWrapper requires ffmpeg to be available in terminal

Then, check out the setup script located under scripts/first_setup.sh.

1. create a new conda environment for this project using conda create -n chain_control python=3.10
2. git clone this repository
3. cd into the scripts folder and use source first_setup.sh file

Documentation

Check out the introductory notebooks located under /docs and the examples under /cc/examples

Bugfixes

---

Bug: "Mujoco-Lib could not be found"
Solution: Re-install `dm_control`
Steps:
    - pip install --upgrade dm_control

---

Bug: "python_*.so could not be found"
Solution: `LD_LIBRARY_PATH` Environment Variable is incorrectly set.
Steps: 
    Let `chain_control` be the name of your conda-env, and `simon` the username.
    - Add to `.bashrc`
        `export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/home/simon/miniforge3/envs/chain_control/lib`

---

Bug: *Apple Silicon specific* : pytest does not run.
Solution: ray is not properly setup. Re-install grpcio
Steps:
    - pip uninstall grpcio
    - conda install grpcio