brom_drake-py

Brom is a helper library for the Drake robotics simulation and verification library. Its goal is to simplify common debugging and testing activities in Drake (for example, logging the outputs of systems in your block diagrams).

Some of Brom's features:

Feature	Code	Results
The Diagram Watcher (the DiagramWatcher will log + plot all output ports of your Diagram automatically)	add_watcher_and_build()
The Drake-ify feature (converts your URDF file into a form that Drake can consume)	drakeify_my_urdf()
Productions (partially complete robot scenarios to test your algorithms)	(See Examples Directory or the Docs)
Puppeteer (Move free bodies in drake with a RigidTransform input)	Puppetmaker class's methods

To learn more, look through our documentation here.

Installation

brom_drake is available on PyPI and installable with pip:

pip install brom-drake

ROS 2-capable install

If you use ROS 2 package URIs (for example, package://...) and want brom_drake to resolve package share directories via ament_index_python, install the optional ROS 2 extra:

pip install "brom-drake[ros2]"

In most ROS 2 workflows, make sure your ROS 2 environment is sourced before running your scripts so package discovery works as expected.

Developer install

You can also install the package during local development by cloning the repository and running the following commands from inside it:

pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -e .

Citation

Feel free to cite this project if it helped with your work!

@misc{bromDrake2024,
  author = "Kwesi Rutledge and the Wrench Robotics Team",
  title = "Brom: A Helper Library for the Drake Toolbox",
  year = 2024,
}

FAQs

Why the name Brom?

Brom the storyteller is a character from the Inheritance series by Christopher Paolini. He is a wise mentor that helps Eragon (the protagonist) master dragons. ;)

Where are the release notes?

You can follow the development of Brom by:

• Following the Release Notes on Substack ([Substack])
• Studying the Pull Requests (available above in the Pull Requests tab of GitHub), or

How can I support this project?

Feel free to create an issue/send the Wrench Robotics team a message if you're interested in helping out!

Related Work

Some other work in the open-source Drake community:

• kinova_drake - A Drake-based library that builds a simple version of the manipulation station for the Kinova Gen3 robot arm. Also works with the hardware.
• airo-drake - A python package meant to simplify working with Drake and the airo-mono repository from the AI and Robotics Lab at Ghent University.

To-Dos

• Figure out how to tell if two systems are connected in Drake.
• Add more readme explanations of what is going on under the hood.
• Create a method that makes each material in a URDF file have unique names if they have specific values
• Allow for the user to give "Drake-unfriendly" URDFs to ShowMeThisModel production