🚀 Distro 2022.05.0 Released

[Nicogene]

2022.05.0 Distro Announcement

Brief description of the announcement

Hello @robotology/everyone 👋

The iCub project is happy to announce our Software Distro 2022.05.0 📦

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.

The apt binaries cover the following platforms:

• Ubuntu 20.04 Focal 64-bits.
• Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy 64-bits.
• Debian 10 Buster 64-bits.

⚠️ The conda binaries are not provided for this release due to temporary problems, and a 2022.05.1 version will be released as soon as we will fix the generation of the binaries.

Detailed context

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

🆕 Updates

🔘 blenderRCBPanel now handles the cartesian space

This distro ships some important features to the blenderRCBPanel of blender-robotics-utils.
As explained here, it is now possible to control the rig in the cartesian space, defining a target to reach or drag and dropping the end effector to a specific position.

🔘 YARP_telemetry renamed in robometry

Both the name of the repository (yarp-telemetry) and the library (YARP_telemetry) has been changed in robometry. This change has been done because the dependency of YARP is now optional, it has been kept just for the telemetryDeviceDumper.
Here is a simple guide for porting a code that used YARP_telemetry to use robometry:

CMake

-     find_package(YARP COMPONENTS telemetry)
+     find_package(robometry)

-     find_package(YARP_telemetry)
+     find_package(robometry)

-     target_link_libraries(foo PUBLIC YARP::YARP_telemetry)
+     target_link_libraries(foo PUBLIC robometry::robometry)

C++

-     using namespace yarp::telemetry::experimental;
+     using namespace robometry;

-     #include <yarp/telemetry/experimental/BufferManager.h>
+     #include <robometry/BufferManager.h>

🔘 New friction parameters

Dedicated parameters for dealing with the Coulomb and viscous friction have been made available by @sgiraz via the following relevant PR's:

• Add implementation for friction parameters yarp#2805
• Extend the friction parameters to support viscous and coulomb frictions icub-main#782
• Add eOmc_FrictionParams_t to EoMotionControl  icub-firmware-shared#57
• Add support for viscousPos/Neg and coulombPos/Neg friction parameters icub-firmware#254
• mc4plus v3.48, ems v3.50, mc2plus v3.34 icub-firmware-build#51

ℹ️ The parameters are not used yet in the FW. This will be a matter of a later development under the responsibility of @robotology/iit-artificial-mechanical-intelligence.

🔘 Kalman Filter into the FW

@sgiraz introduced a model of a Kalman filter in icub-firmware-models that allows us to generate code to be deployed into our EMS firmware. This filter serves to provide better estimates of the velocity and acceleration at the joint level.

The corresponding generated code has been introduced in our eco-system via the following PR:

• Add Kalman Filter to ems mc2plus and mc4plus icub-firmware#263
• Add Kalman Filter test model icub-firmware-models#3
• Add Kalman Filter experimental FW ems+mc2plus+mc4plus icub-firmware-build#53

ℹ️ As of now, the Kalman parameters are hand-coded, although they will be made configurable in the next release.

🔘 Fix of shared libraries in icub-main

@sgiraz fixed in icub-main the placing of shared libraries via robotology/icub-main#790.

🔘 Multiple FT sensors can be now connected to a single EMS board

@triccyx introduced in robotology/icub-main#786 a new device called embObjMultipleFTsensors for connecting multiple FT sensors to a single EMS board.

🔘 All robots upgraded to the use of the latest NWS/NWC YARP wrappers

YARP-3.5.0 introduced new network wrappers. It took some time for us, but we managed to update all the robot XML files accordingly.
See the relevant issues:

• Upgrade robots to the latest NWS/NWC layers - 2 robots-configuration#322
• Upgrade robots to the latest NWS/NWC layers - 3 robots-configuration#323
• Upgrade robots to the latest NWS/NWC layers - 4 robots-configuration#324
• Upgrade robots to the latest NWS/NWC layers - 5 robots-configuration#327
• Upgrade robots to the latest NWS/NWC layers - 6 robots-configuration#329
• Upgrade robots to the latest NWS/NWC layers - 7 robots-configuration#330
• Upgrade robots to the latest NWS/NWC layers - 8 robots-configuration#337
• Upgrade robots to the latest NWS/NWC layers - 9 robots-configuration#341
• Upgrade robots to the latest NWS/NWC layers - 10 robots-configuration#346
• Upgrade robots to the latest NWS/NWC layers - 11 robots-configuration#347
• Upgrade robots to the latest NWS/NWC layers - 12 robots-configuration#349

⚠️ Thereby, be careful when upgrading your robots to this distro. Make sure that your local files are aligned with those we have just delivered.

🔘 XSD/XPath-based checks of XML robot files

In robotology/robots-configuration#361, @davidetome, with the supervision of @triccyx, added the possibility to verify the semantics of the XML robot files in search of typos and missing options related to the new NWS/NWC YARP wrappers. This is particularly useful for CAN robots, which lack the dry-run of yarprobotinterface available instead on ETH robots, and paves the way to more in-depth tests in the upcoming releases.

🔘 Fix of Skin specs for all robots

In robotology/robots-configuration#348, @davidetome fixed some wrong specifications found in the XML files defining the skin of the robots. The fix was concerned with the following two bugs found by @maggia80:

• The parameter skinType for the board with ID 14 (hand) should be configured with skinType=1 (palm and fingertips) so that there isn't temperature compensation.
• The parameter enabled in the group, defaultCfgTriangle should be false, so that we can specify which triangle needs to be enabled separately. Differently, the MTB4 boards send all the CAN messages related to all the triangles even if the triangles are physically not connected.

👴 Deprecations

🔘 Ubuntu 18.04 is not supported anymore

Following the policy of supporting two LTS Ubuntu releases, from this distro installing with apt dependencies in Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) support has been dropped in favor of Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish).

🐛 Known Issues

🔘 r_wrist_yaw joint direction flipped in some iCub 2.* models in icub-models

Some iCub 2.* models provided by icub-models have the r_wrist_yaw direction flipped w.r.t. to the real robot. This problem does not affect the iCubGazeboV2_5_visuomanip model (robotology/icub-models#156).

🔘 conda binary packages are not provided

Due to problems in the generation pipeline, conda binary packages (including the meta-packages robotology-distro and robotology-distro-all) have not been generated for this distro. As soon as the generation problems will be fixed, a 2022.05.1 version will be released.

[Nicogene]

Hi @robotology/everyone,

We're happy to announce that the latest Software Distro 2022.05.1 is now available. 📦
This release addresses the known issues of the 2022.05.0 as explained in these release notes.
As a patch release, it is shipped only in terms of tags of the repositories, as shown in the Software Versioning Table.