Starting Robot Operation

Get your robots moving and ready for work

Navigate to anvil-loader

Your Anvil Devbox should automatically open a terminal inside the anvil-loader directory on every boot. If not, navigate there yourself in a terminal:

cd /home/anvil/anvil-loader

Confirm the hardware config

Inside anvil-loader, the .env.config file contains various configuration settings for the system, stored and subsequently accessed as environment variables. These come with sensible defaults, but can be adjusted to suit preferences. The only one you need to ensure is correct is the ARMS_CONTROL_CONFIG_FILE.

This variable references one of the yaml files in the config directory, which contains different supported hardware configurations for the robots. You just need to pick the file that matches your physical setup. For example, if you have two sets of OpenARM arms and you want to use the Leader-Follower control paradigm, notice the openarm_leader_follower_teleop.yaml file in the config directory, and make sure that's what's referenced in your .env.config:

ARMS_CONTROL_CONFIG_FILE=openarm_leader_follower_teleop.yaml

If you have one single OpenYAM and you want to use the left Quest controller to pilot it, you might pick openyam_quest_teleop_single_left.yaml:

ARMS_CONTROL_CONFIG_FILE=openyam_quest_teleop_single_left.yaml

Run the control stack

Once in anvil-loader, you can start the stack with Docker Compose:

anvil@anvil-workcell:~/anvil-loader$ docker compose up

You should see your robots move to their home positions, at which point they're ready for operation.

Power down the robots

Powering down the robots is as simple as pressing Ctrl+C in the terminal where you ran docker compose up.

If you can't do that (eg. you chose to run in detached mode with docker compose up -d to avoid seeing logs), you can of course shut things off by taking down the compose stack inside anvil-loader:

anvil@anvil-workcell:~/anvil-loader$ docker compose down

Get updates

Getting the latest software updates is as easy as updating the repository:

anvil@anvil-workcell:~/anvil-loader$ git pull

You can get more information about anvil-loader here:

Anvil Loader