Common Issues

There are some common issues which may be encountered while using the toolbox.

Toolbox Volatility

The toolbox is still in beta stage and thus has frequent and often breaking changes. We follow the Semantic Versioning guidlines.

Installed off PiPI?

You can update the toolbox: pip install --upgrade roboticstoolbox-python and this should update spatialmath-python and swift as required.

Installed using Github Version?

If the toolbox is installed from Github, you are also required to install Swift, Spatial Geometry and Spatial Math from Github and not PyPI.

If you update the toolbox through git pull and reinstall (if not using an interactive install) you will also need to use the Github version of Swift, Spatial Geometry and Spatial Math and pull the latest changes (and reinstall if required) from those.

Due to the C extensions built into the toolbox and Swift, if the C extensions have been modified, you will need to reinstall the corresponding package to rebuild the C extension. This is required even if you did an interactive install.

When in doubt, do pip install . when you are located in the top level directory of the package. This will uninstall the package if installed, and then reinstall it. Use pip install -e . to do an interactive install/reinstall. Note that you may need to do this for the toolbox as well as for Swift.

Odd behaviour from Swift

Try clearing the browser cache, see this link for help.

If you are using Safari on Mac, enable Metal (under experimental features).

Visualising robots using Matplotlib in Jupyter or sciview

• Try changing backend to QT %matplotlib Qt
• Try adding this %matplotlib widgets to the top of the notebook
• Or try this %matplotlib notbook