Help Topic: Downloading and Building the MOOS-IvP Software


Maintained by: mikerb@mit.edu         Get PDF


Downloading and Building the MOOS-IvP Software


The MOOS-IvP autonomy code may be checked out and built following the steps on this page. Before you begin, below are few steps that need to be done beforehand:

For MacOS    [top]


Here are prerequisites for the Mac (likely not needed if working with an MIT course-provided laptop):

  • On the Mac you will need to have installed XCode and command line tools. More info here:
    http://oceanai.mit.edu/ivpman/help/osx_get_xcode
  • On the Mac you will need to have installed either the Homebrew or Macports package manager installed, for installing a few external software dependencies you will need for building all of MOOS-IvP. While the helm and other "on-the-robot" apps do not have dependencies, the MOOS-IvP graphical (operator) tools do have dependencies like OpenGL, FLTK, etc.
  • Once the package manager has been installed, homebrew (or macports), per the above instructions, install the packages needed for running the course software, e.g., cmake, subversion, fltk, libtiff, xterm.
 $ brew install cmake subversion fltk libtiff xterm

For Linux    [top]


Here are prerequisites for Linux (likely not needed if working with an MIT course-provided laptop):

  • On a Linux machine, the build environment, e.g., C++, and the package manager come with the Linux OS install, so there should be no issues there.
  • Install the packages needed for running the course software, e.g., cmake, xterm, subversion, libfltk1.3-dev, libtiff5-dev.
 $ apt-get --assume-yes install cmake xterm subversion libfltk1.3-dev libtiff5-dev

Downloading the Software    [top]


The latest software is downloaded using Subversion (svn). You will download this into your home directory.

  $ cd 
  $ svn co https://oceanai.mit.edu/svn/moos-ivp-aro/trunk moos-ivp
  • The above command invokes svn to check out a tree, at the given URL, with the local name of "moos-ivp".
  • This tree is generally available from moos-ivp.org in one of several forms. The most public forms are (1) the latest release, and (2) the development trunk.
  • At any point after an initial checkout, users may pull down the latest updates to the software by typing:
  $ cd moos-ivp
  $ svn update

Building the Course Software    [top]


After a successful download, you should have a new directory (folder) called moos-ivp. All the code is in this folder. There are README instructions in the top-level folder for each OS flavor.

    Assuming you have installed the handful of prerequisite packages outlined above, the course software may be built in the steps below:

  $ cd moos-ivp
  $ ./build-moos.sh
  (let it build)
  $ ./build-ivp.sh
  (let it build)

Document Maintained by: mikerb@mit.edu        
Page built from LaTeX source using texwiki, developed at MIT. Errata to issues@moos-ivp.org. Get PDF