SIERRA Installation Reference

SIERRA PyPi Package

The SIERRA PyPi package provides the following executables:

  • sierra-cli - The command line interface to SIERRA.

The SIERRA PyPi package provides the following man pages, which can be viewed via man <name>. Man pages are meant as a reference, and though I’ve tried to make them as full featured as possible, there are some aspects of SIERRA which are only documented on the online docs (e.g., the tutorials). Available manpages are:

  • sierra-cli - The SIERRA command line interface.

  • sierra-usage - How to use SIERRA (everything BUT the command line interface).

  • sierra-platforms - The target platforms that SIERRA currently supports (e.g., ARGoS).

  • sierra-examples - Examples of SIERRA usage via command line invocations demonstrating various features.

  • sierra-glossary - Glossary of SIERRA terminology to make things easier to understand.

  • sierra-exec-envs - The execution environments that SIERRA currently supports (e.g., SLURM).

Installing SIERRA

pip3 install sierra-research

SIERRA ROSBridge

SIERRA provides a ROS1 package containing functionality it uses to manage simulations and provide run-time support to projects using a Platform built on ROS. To use SIERRA with a ROS platform, you need to setup the SIERRA ROSbridge package here (details in README): https://github.com/jharwell/sierra_rosbridge.

This package provides the following nodes:

  • sierra_timekeeper - Tracks time on an Experimental Run, and terminates once the amount of time specified in --exp-setup has elapsed. Necessary because ROS does not provide a way to say “Run for this long and then terminate”. An XML tag including this node is inserted by SIERRA into each .launch file.