🚀 Distro 2021.08 Released

[Nicogene]

Brief description of the announcement

Hello @robotology/everyone 👋

The iCub project is happy to announce our Software Distro 2021.08 📦

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 18.04 Bionic 64-bits.
• Ubuntu 20.04 Focal 64-bits.
• Debian 10 Buster 64-bits.

The conda binaries cover the following platforms:

• Linux x64 64-bits.
• macOS x64 64-bits.
• Windows 10 x64 64-bits.

Detailed context

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

🆕 Updates

🔘 Blender robotics utils

With this distro, we are shipping a brand new repository called blender-robotics-utils.
It contains a script called urdfToBlender for importing your robot inside Blender, starting from the urdf. For example, we exported and published the rigs of iCub 2.5 and iCub 3, but the script is completely agnostic about the robot to be rigified:

iCub 2.5	iCub 3

Moreover, we published also blenderRCBPanel, a script that spawns a panel inside Blender for connecting to the parts of the robot and controlling it. The result is that the real robot follows the movements made by the animated rig as in the video below.
For now, this controller has been tailored for iCub, but we are planning to make it as much as general as possible.

🔘 Technical Preview: Funnythings app

Furthermore, we are introducing a new application for the funny-things pre-programmed demonstrations.

This application is a frontend to the well-known funny-things scripts, that will allow the user to compose demos by just drag and drop actions. The actions/behaviors are taken from the main funny-things repertoire which includes sets of actions eg: gazing, blinking, face expressions, speaking, etc...

On the left-hand side, we have the list of the available simple actions, which are predefined, and can be selected to construct the custom demonstration on the right-hand side.

Each action has its own set of options that the user can use to personalize the desired action.

For example, a speech action has two options:

• The string to say:
• wait until finished speaking

The user can insert all the required actions on the right-hand side, he/she can rearrange them by dragging them, modify the options and delete them.

Once the custom demo is complete, the user simply clicks on the play button. The custom demo can be saved/loaded and exported as a bash script to be run by hand if necessary as a normal funny-things bash script.

Here is a video demonstrating the application:

releaseSmall.mp4

This is a preview and will soon be available in robot-bazaar for deployment on your machine.

🔘 conda is the new suggested workflow for macOS and Windows installations

The new conda-based workflow that was introduced experimentally in the previous distro is now fully documented, directly in the robotology-superbuild README: https://github.com/robotology/robotology-superbuild/tree/v2021.08 .

In particular, for Windows and macOS this workflow permits to easily install binaries of the robotology packages, and quickly test them even in the system without any compiler.

👴 Deprecations

Homebrew deprecation

This distro release is the first one for which the existing macOS Homebrew-based installation process has been deprecated, as it is increasingly difficult to maintain it, as discussed in robotology/robotology-superbuild#842 .

macOS users are suggested to try to use the conda-based workflows to install the robotology software, either from binary packages (that were not available with Homebrew) and also when compiling from source, and report any problem that they may experience.

The current plan is to still support Homebrew-based installation for the 2021.11 release, and drop support for it shortly after.

Gazebo 9/10

This release is the last one with support for Gazebo 9/10 . From the next distro release 2021.11, Gazebo 11 will be required for all Gazebo-related software and models. See #534 for more details.