🚀 Distro 2023.05.0 Released

[Nicogene]

2023.05.0 Distro Announcement

Brief description of the announcement

Hello @robotology/everyone 👋

The iCub project is happy to announce our Software Distro 2023.05.0 📦

This is a major release that comprises binary packages as well. Therefore, follow the instructions available in our documentation to upgrade your system and/or download the new dependencies.

You can find the tags composing this distro in our Software Versioning Table.

Detailed context

This distro is shipped with several updates and fixes, including the ones listed hereafter:

🆕 Updates

🔘 embObjFTSensor replaces embObjStrain

embObjFTSensor now handles also strain board, this made embObjStrain device obsolete, then it has been removed.

• Make embObjFTSensor handle strain board for removing embObjStrain device icub-main#873
• Get rid of embObjStrain device icub-main#875

🔘 Refactored how FT sensors data is published

This Distro ship a deep refactor on how the FT sensors data is published both on real and simulated robots. Now both simulated and real robot publish their Force-Torque Sensors measurements only via the multipleanalogsensorsserver YARP device. The name parameter passed to this device is: /<robotPortPrefix>/<partName>/FT. This means that for each part there will be a multipleanalogsensorsserver device that will open the following YARP ports:

• /<robotPortPrefix>/<partName>/FT/measures:o : that publishes sensors information for the part, using the structure defined in https://github.com/robotology/yarp/blob/master/src/devices/multipleAnalogSensorsMsgs/multipleAnalogSensorsSerializations.thrift
• /<robotPortPrefix>/<partName>/FT/rpc:o : that expose several information related to the part via a YARP RPC port

These YARP ports are not meant to be accessed directly, but should be accessed instead via the multipleanalogsensorsclient device.

The publishing via AnalogServer has been removed since this Distro.
Here some development:

• Replace analogServer with multipleanalogsensorsserver for publishing FT data – Stint 1 robots-configuration#470
• Replace analogServer with multipleanalogsensorsserver for publishing FT data – Stint 2 robots-configuration#485
• Refactoring of FT configurations for publishing them divided per parts icub-models-generator#239
• Refactoring of FT configurations for publishing them divided per part icub-tech-iit/ergocub-software#123

🔘 Fixed launching face expressions on iCub

We fixed the face expressions, which now rely on the use of serialPort_nws_yarp through the following PR's:

• Fix serialPort_nws_yarp device to run faceExpressions on iCub* icub-main#883
• Change the device running faceExpressions from serialport to serialPort_nws_yarp icub-main#877
• Fixed context handling for faceExpressions icub-main#888

🔘 Introduced robots-configuration CI dry-run

This is the first distro sporting the CI dry-run of the robot configuration files.

The goal is to check the consistency of XML files (e.g., missing files, malformed syntax...) as well as of the device drivers launched with the robot (e.g., missing parameters, deprecated syntax...) within the CI of the robots-configuration repository for each proposed changes through PR's.
This way, we can easily detect errors and leftovers ahead of the deployment.

The outcome of the dry-run is returned as an artifact within the CI workflow.

🔘 Calibration 14

This Distro provides the new calibration 14: it has been developed for calibrating the joint with the absolute encoder at the joint (which currently works with POS service / FAP encoder sensor) and with incremental encoder at the motor. The calibration 14 is useful to calibrate the incremental encoder reaching a hardware stop and thus ensure that the movement of the rotor is always within the limits specified by the user, avoiding damage to the motor itself.

👴 Deprecations

🔘 Deb binaries

As discussed here, we decided to deprecate the apt binaries in favor of conda ones that are delivered for both Linux, Windows and macOS.
Please refer to the official documentation for further details.

[traversaro]

If anyone is having problems with the release 2023.05.0 to read FT sensors on real iCub, please note that we discovered a bug related to that that is being fixed by robotology/icub-main#892 .

[Nicogene]

Today we released the Distro 2023.05.2 which contains some important fixes/features such as:

• Update firmwareupdater to handle calibration functions for strain2 icub-main#893
• embObjMultipleFTsensors: Set the status to MAS_OK even if the timeout check is disabled icub-main#892
• Fix FT sensors name after some tests icub-models-generator#240
• Update torso PID gains of icub2.5 icub-models-generator#241
• [ergocub] fixed FT FW version robots-configuration#535
• [iCubGenova11] fixed FT FW version robots-configuration#534
• Robots Icebox robots-configuration#533

[pattacini]

Pay attention in particular to the introduction of the Robots Icebox in robots-configuration.

More on this at https://github.com/robotology/robots-configuration/blob/master/robots-icebox/README.md.