from_binary.rst

Binary installation (macOS, Ubuntu)

Important Note (October, 2016)

Drake is currently undergoing a major renovation, with all of the core libraries moving into C++. The examples will move and the existing APIs will change.

There are experimental binary packages of Drake available at:

• https://drake-packages.csail.mit.edu/drake/nightly/drake-latest-xenial.tar.gz
• https://drake-packages.csail.mit.edu/drake/nightly/drake-latest-mac.tar.gz

• :samp:`https://drake-packages.csail.mit.edu/drake/nightly/drake-{yyyymmdd}-{mac|xenial}.tar.gz`.

  • Example: https://drake-packages.csail.mit.edu/drake/nightly/drake-20171015-xenial.tar.gz

Example usages of these binaries are shown in this example CMake project. For the compilers used to produce these releases, see :ref:`binary-packages`. If you are unsure of which approach to use, we suggest you :ref:`build from source <build_from_source>` instead.

Using older (2015) releases

We cannot offer support for older releases, but we still host the binaries for reference.

Download the appropriate binary release for your platform https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake/releases Simply extract the archive file into a folder of your choice (mine is called drake-distro).

Running MATLAB examples

To run the MATLAB examples, change directories (in MATLAB) into the drake-distro/drake folder and at the MATLAB prompt do:

addpath_drake

Then cd into the examples directories and try some things out. Here are a few fun ones to get you started:

• runLQR in the examples/CartPole directory
• runLQR in the examples/Quadrotor2D directory
• RimlessWheelPlant.run() in the examples/RimlessWheel directory
• StateMachineControl.run() in the examples/PlanarMonopodHopper directory

Please note that you will have to run addpath_drake each time you start MATLAB, or add it to your startup.m.

Linux Specific

The version of the standard C++ libraries that are shipped with the Linux distribution of MATLAB is severely outdated and can cause problems when running mex files that are built against a newer version of the standard. The typical error message in this case reports Invalid MEX-Files

To work around this issue, the symbolic link for the standard C++ library provided by MATLAB must be redirected to point to a more up-to-date version.

First, make sure that a suitable version of the standard library is installed:

sudo apt-get install g++-4.4

Now, the symbolic link in MATLAB must be updated to point to the version that was just installed in /usr/lib. An example for MATLAB R2014a is shown below:

cd /usr/local/MATLAB/R2014a/sys/os/glnxa64
sudo rm libstdc++.so.6
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.4/libstdc++.so libstdc++.so.6