NOTE: Only Windows XP has been tested. Windows 7 and others have been reported to work, but might need to modify the executable properties to windows95 compatibility mode after the executable has been built.
It is recommended to use OpenRAVE from the official Windows Installers on Sourceforge.
Download the sources from sourceforge (Tortoise SVN is recommended). The subversion url is:
https://openrave.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/openrave/tags/latest_stable
Check out the openrave sources in a path whose directories do not contain spaces!!!. For example C:\openrave
.
A lot of the 3rd party libraries are already inside the openrave sources. However, the following need to be installed:
Both Octave and Matlab are supported and the OpenRAVE build system automatically detects and compiles the mex files for each.
mkoctfile
to the $Path environment variable. If you are using Matlab, make sure that the path to mex
is in the PATH environment variable (ie, typing mex
on the command line gives the MATLAB compiler). On Windows Mik-Tex overwrites the mex
program with its own version, so any matlab paths have to be declared before Mik-Tex in the PATH variable. You can check if the paths are set correctly by starting up the command prompt and typing mkoctfile
or mex
.Octave users:
mkoctfile
is in your system path.$OPENRAVE_INSTALL\share\openrave\octave
to the Octave path (default is C:\Program Files\openrave\share\openrave\octave
).Matlab users:
mex
is in your path and actually points to the Matlab mex
program.$OPENRAVE_INSTALL\share\openrave-*\matlab
and addit to the MATLAB Path. Can use runmex.bat for that.Run the CMake
GUI and specify a build directory somewhere out of the current source directory. Click on the Configure and Generate buttons. For Visual Studio users, this will generate a OpenRAVE.sln file. Open the Microsoft Visual Studio solution file and select the RelWithDebInfo or Release configuration, and build everything. Once done, build the INSTALL project. This should install everything in C:\Program Files\openrave
. The installation directory can be changed by configuring CMake's
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX variable to a new path. If using the command-line, can specify the install directory with -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="my/new/install/dir"
.
Before running anything, have to modify the following environment variables:
PYTHONPATH
- add "C:\\Program Files\\openrave\\share\\openrave"
Path
- add "C:\\Program Files\\openrave\\bin"
to the front. Furthermore, if Qt and Boost are installed in separate directories, have to add the location of their DLLs to Path (for example C:\Qt\4.7.1\bin
and C:\Program Files\boost\boost_1_44\lib
). Be very careful when putting it in the back since several user have had problems with different Qt libraries conflicting!Whenever updating subversion, it should just be sufficient to run runcmake_win.bat
again and then open the solution file build all the projects, and then manually build the INSTALL project. If an update to libraries or programs happens (for example Octave/MATLAB/python was installed/uninstalled), it is recommended to clear the cmake cache by first removing build\CMakeCache.txt
before running runcmake_win.bat
.