🚀 Distro 2021.05 Released

[Nicogene]

Brief description of the announcement

Hello @robotology/everyone 👋

The iCub project is happy to announce our Software Distro 2021.05 📦

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 binaries cover the following platforms:

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

Detailed context

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

🆕 Updates

🔘 YARP telemetry suite

The 2021.05 distribution as part of the ROBOTOLOGY_ENABLE_DYNAMICS, includes the new repository https://github.com/robotology/yarp-telemetry, a C++ telemetry suite for logging data from your robot or sensor/s.

It is composed by a C++ library called libYARP_telemetry and a YARP device driver called telemetryDeviceDumper for dumping data in .mat file format.

Here is a plot of iCub joint values collected by the telemetryDeviceDumper:

🔘 App deployment: Supervised Camera Calibration and GraspTheBall upgrade

With this Distro are shipped important upgrades in the apps for the calibration procedure of the iCub robot:

• Supervised Camera Calibration supports now the calibration for event-driven cameras and new resolutions(640x480 and 1024x768)

• GraspTheBall supports the color and reaching offset calibration for the demoRedBall.

🔘 icub-firmware-models

We have launched the new repository ✨ robotology/icub-firmware-models, which provides access to the ⚙ MATLAB/Simulink models we have been designing and using to generate automatically so as deploy the firmware of our embedded boards.

In this Distro, we have published the Simulink model underlying the FW that runs on the FT sensors. Check it out! 💫

This represents the very first step of our initiative toward a Model-Based Design approach to the FW development.

Credits go to @triccyx and @simeonedussoni for this initial contribution!

🔘 Technical Preview: Conda Binary Packages

The 2021.05 distro is the first distro for which experimental Conda binary packages based on dependencies provided by conda-forge are available on Linux/macOS/Windows.

This means that you can install robotology packages corresponding to the distro in a Conda environment, for example, if you want to install the necessary packages to run the iCub simulation on Gazebo at the version of the 2021.05 distro, you just need to run:

conda install -c conda-forge -c robotology yarp=3.4.5 icub-main=1.20 gazebo-yarp-plugins=3.6.1 icub-models=1.20

Where the version corresponding to a specific distro (since 2021.05) can be found in the iCub documentation.

Both MATLAB and Python bindings are included in these Conda packages.

At the moment, these packages are still an experimental feature that could change in the future, but if you want to try them you can follow the official documentation on Conda binary packages of the robotology-superbuild. If you have any comment or feedback on the packages, please to open an issue in robotology-superbuild to report a problem or a discussion in robotology/community for more generic feedback.

🔘 Updated policy for versioning icub-* repositories

Our icub-* repositories follow tightly the semantic versioning.
Until now, the versions of those repositories have been mostly in line with the icub-main version.
Starting with Distro 2021.05, we decided to break this alignment and let the icub-* versions grow at their own pace.

This decision helps us accommodate for different development timeframes and, primarily, to avoid ending up with many consecutive tags pointing to the same commit (tags do appear on the releases page), as it was frequent in the past.

Here is the list of the icub-* repositories that from Distro 2021.05 will undergo their own independent versioning:

• icub-tests
• icub-contrib-common
• icub-basic-demos
• icub-tutorials

❌ Removed

🔘 icub-gazebo removed in favor of icub-models

As mentioned in the Distro 2021.02 Release Notes the Gazebo models contained in the icub-gazebo repository served as well for many years, but now all their functionalities are also provided by the models contained in icub-models.

For this reason, the 2021.05 distro officially removed icub-gazebo from the distro.