Over the course of the fall 2021 semester, we will be porting most chapters/notebooks from Colab to Deepnote. We expect to use Colab only for notebooks that require the GPU, since Deepnote does not currently offer GPU machines on the free/student plans.
Our workflow with Google Colab is currently in a sad state, because Colab upgraded to Python 3.7 (Drake supports python 3.6, 3.8, and 3.9 by default, since those are the apt/homebrew supported configurations on ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, and mac, respectively).
As of today, setup_manipulation_colab.py works by pulling manually generated drake binaries for Python 3.7. We use a somewhat scary header in the notebook to fetch that script and run the install.
Very soon, we expect to have pip install drake working on colab. We should follow this with pip install manipulation, and the entire preamble can be simplified to a commented line like #!pip install manipulation # Uncomment this line and run it once to set up Google Colab.