🚀 Distro 2021.11.0 Released

[Nicogene]

2021.11.0 Distro Announcement

Brief description of the announcement

Hello @robotology/everyone 👋

The iCub project is happy to announce our Software Distro 2021.11.0 📦

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 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

🔘 New PARROT application

A new application is available on robot-bazaar: PARROT application. The aim of this app is to allow the user to speak into the microphone and have the robot repeat what has been said with his own voice.

🔘 Support for AEA3 absolute encoders

We now support the latest release of AEA absolute encoders via robotology/icub-firmware-build#43.

Remarkably, AEA3 do have 14 bit resolution, whereas AEA2 have 12 bit only.

🔘 Enabled embObjFTsensor support to ETH robots w/ STRAIN2

We revised the configuration files of the iCub robots based on the Ethernet communication system and equipped with the STRAIN2 boards with the goal of enabling the use of the device embObjFTsensor.

See robotology/robots-configuration#287.

🔘 New CLI options for FirmwareUpdater

This addition allows for doing the following operations:

• Change CAN board ID via SOCKETCAN device
• Change CAN board ID via ETH device
• Change IP address of ETH boards

Check out the extensive description of these new capabilities at robotology/icub-main#776.

🔘 Smartly downsample error messages when skipping control commands

We designed a dedicated state machine devoted to smartly downsampling the error messages generated by yarprobotinterface when received commands are to be skipped because of a mismatch of the control mode. This is meant to drastically reduce the amount of the logged messages in case the the stream gets overwhelming.

See robotology/icub-main#770.

🔘 Refactored icub-* repos to be aligned with YARP-3.5

We grabbed the opportunity to update all icub-* repos in order to replace deprecated services such as *Int and *Double methods in favor of latest *Int32 and *Float64.

See robotology/icub-main#773 for further details.

🔘 Fixed deadlock affecting several multi-joint methods

The bug was affecting several multi-joint methods, e.g. getControlModesRaw(const int n_joints, const int *joints, int *modes). If those methods were called once, the robot got frozen.

See robotology/icub-main#766.

👴 Deprecations

🔘 Removed icub-main/staticgrabber

The staticgrabber device in icub-main opens a ppm file and publishes its content on a port. However, this functionality is also available through the fakeFrameGrabber in YARP. Thereby, staticgrabber has been deprecated.

See robotology/icub-main#774.