General Remarks

Jupyter Notebooks & PyCharm

If you have the situation that you activate your venv that has rospy installed and launched PyCharm from the console you’ll run into trouble using jupyter notebooks. PyCharm allows you to correctly set up the jupyter server, however the notebook will always use your /usr/bin/python as interpreter and you can’t select the correct one in the drop down menu.

To fix this issue one has to execute

python -m ipykernel install --user --name <kernel_name> --display-name "<Name_to_display>"

in your terminal. –name is the name of your virtual environment and –display-name is the name that will display in the drop down menu of jupyter. After that, select the correct kernel and everything should work now.

Adding Notebooks to the Documentation

Adding notebooks to the documentation is done with the nbsphinx extension. If they are outside of the doc folder please put a symbolic link in the doc/source/notebooks folder, such that no duplication is done. Sphinx will automatically copy them during the build process. Use relative symbolic links since absolute paths won’t work for different machines.

Dirty Terminals

If your terminal gets polluted by PyBullet complaining about incomplete URDF descriptions, you need to first fix your URDF files by inserting the missing tags and second delete the resources/cached folder.

Missing pr2_arm_kinematics

Aptitudes autoremove likes to also remove the arm kinematics. Reinstall the missing libraries with

sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-moveit

Then rebuild your workspace.