Research for Cognitive Interaction

In r2234, work on an integrated version of task trees has started. With these, a task can be composed of a sequence of sub-tasks. The definition of sub-task structure can be provided at deployment time, through a configuration file.

The new BonSAI release 0.10.0 now comes with maven as managment/build tool. Additionally the SCXML feature is no activated, which means that you can compose robot behaviors via SCXML files. Check the examples or the mailing list.

New General Features¶

• added Box-Plots upport to the PlotWidget
• applied some major changes to the default image visualization widget

• added fullscreen mode for single widget and an extra blue button for fullscreen (F11 works as well)
• added tooltips to the tiny blue widget buttons

• added tooltip to GUI compoenents (use @tooltip=text in your GUI definition)
• improved Kinect RGBD-Calibration tools

• replaced (wrong) homography based RGBD mapping with a more sophisticated projective geometry based mapping
• the new mapping works very well and seems to be comparable to the (unknown) open-NI RGBD-calibration method
• added performance optimizations (point-cloud creation + rgbd mappings takes less then 5ms)
• added a new SceneObject class called RGBDImageSceneObject (which will later use the already existent PointcloudSceneObject internally, but it will provide a much simpler and configurable interface)
• added triangle based rendering to the RGBDImageSceneObject class (quite slow still)
• added depthmap smoothing for better RGBD mapping
• added automatic IR-image shift to the Kinect grabber (which compensates for the hardware offset)

• added a new tool called icl-configurable-info, which can be used to list and inspect the properties of all classes that implement the Configurable-interface
• added a generic RANSAC implementation + demo-application for shape fitting
• moved ICLCore/Random.h to ICLUtils/Random.h
• added generic framework for direct least square model fitting (which was actually part of ICL some year ago in the ICLMEx package)
• extended the Scene's offscreen rendering method, so that it can also render the depth-buffer to simulate Kinect data
• added trylock to the Thread and Mutex class
• PylonGrabber based GIG-E camera support

• merged the development branch back to the trunk
• several optimizations and fixes

• added support for all image depth in the LocalThresholdOp class
• added new UnaryOp class that creates a color distance map: ColorDistanceOp

Important Changes to the Build System¶

• added (still experimental) support for building .deb packages using CMake /CPack

• try by using the debian-package.cfg configuration script. In the resulting build/debian-package/ directory, you can type 'cpack -G DEB' to create a debian package)

• completly re-implemented the dependeny tracking CMake code
• applied several fixes for linux-kernel 3.x support
• compiled ICL (with most dependencies) under Ubuntu 12.04 (beta1)

• in particular fixed the missing reference to pthread_atfork by finding out, that Intel IPP 6.1's libiomp is not compatible to the newest glibc. Instead, we now just suggest to use libiomp5.so from Intel IPP 7.0 (update 6) the new version of libiomp5 is already placed in our /vol/nivision/share/IPP/6.1/sharedlib directory

New Functions and Small Changes¶

• added SceneObject::clearAllPrimitives function
• added style presets to the PlotWidget class
• improved gui-component parsing now, the component string can also contains angular braces
• added linestrip and grid annotations to the PlotWidget class
• reimplemented the ICLWidget's histogram widget by using the new 2D PlotWidget
• accellerated 8u-histogram creation significantly
• added Color to the Common.h header
• added utlitiy method that allows for installing mouse-handler function directly to DataStore::Data instances
• added text(string,point) method to draw widget
• added new constructor to the UnaryCompare op, that allows for defining the comparison operation type as string (e.g. "<=")

Bug Fixes and internal changes¶

• fixed bug in Pylon Grabbers
• the documentation does now also show the icl-version number
• fixed GLImg::getColor(x,y)
• moved ProximityOp compilation into the HAVE_IPP section
• extended makefile system to only build a subset of examples

XTT 2.0.6 has been released last week and is now made available through Maven (see Using XTT for installation instructions). The only major functional difference in this version is that it uses RSB 0.6, instead of 0.5. As RSB 0.6 sports a number of improvements, and is mostly backwards compatible in the API, this update is recommended for RSB users.

XCF users might be interested in the Maven support, which now makes adding XTT to your project a breeze. Check out the using xtt through Maven section

New Features

• Added a very powerful 2D plotting/data visualization component for 1D and 2D data
• Added a full screen mode for all image-visualization and plot components (accessible by a new button or F11)
• Added tool-tips for the blue special buttons of ICLWidgets
• Added OpenCL dependency for
• Added normal estimation for 3D point clouds such as the Kinect 3D image (the OpenCL version is 2 magnitudes faster)
• Added point cloud class
• Added new features to the icl-rotate-image-3D tool
• Optimized marker 6D pose estimation by adding two iterative methods (brute force and simplex based optimization)
• Added a powerful "downhill simplex"-algorithm framework for iterative optimizations
• Reimplemented the FileGrabber class using the "pimpl" pattern
• Added FileGrabber option "loop", which can be set to false to grab all images only once
• Fundamentally restructured the ImageUndistortion classes
• Added built-in support to the GenericGrabber for image un-distortion
• Added a FileGrabber property "frame-index" that allows for random seek within the list of files
• Made SliderHandle and FSlider handle also provide information about their display component
• Added homography- and marker-based calibration for mapping of Kinects RGB and depth camera
• Added the MultiCamFiducialDetectorclass that allows Fiducial-Marker pose estimation from several cameras
• Completely reimplemented ICL's texture map engine, that is used to render images as OpenGL texture
• Complete redesign of the Primitive class for SceneObjects
• Added Shared Textures to the SceneObject class
• Added OpenGL smoothing options for lines, points and faces to the SceneObject class
• Made SceneObject locking more easy and transparent

New Experimental Features

• Made some progress with the Gigabit-Ethernet grabber implementation

Adaptions for the Build System

• Added post-install script that fixes group write permissions in the install path
• Fixed bug, that ICL did not compile if Qt is available, but OpenGL not
• Added configuration scripts for the continuous integration server
• Added the ICL-build version to the Doxygen title

Bug Fixes

• Fixed the bug that nothing was returned in the FiducialDetectorPluginART
• Fixed DynMatrix::solve, which does NOT necessarily need squared matrices
• Fixed bug in the V4L2 Grabber that did sometimes return NULL images after instantiation
• Fixed Homography2D that did not work for n != 4 points
• Fixed Memory Leak in the FileWriterPlugin
• Fixed property listing of the GenericGrabber
• Fixed some Properties in the FileGrabber that were not handled correctly
• Fixed bug, that -force-size option did not work in icl-cam-calib-2
• Fixed bug in CoplanarPointPoseEstimator that did not handle the reference frame correctly
• Fixed bug in PoseEstimator (an unexpected exception caused C++ to throw a std::bad_exception)
• Fixed color bug in SceneObject

After internal use for a while, XTT's 2.0 version is now marked as stable.

Downloads:¶

• source, xtt-2.0.jar
• javadoc api documentation
• non-middleware dependencies.

Apart from these, you need either xcf4j or rsb 0.5.

ChangeLog¶

Compared to the previous beta, these are the important changes:

New Features¶

• Implemented XML support for RSB (previously, only specific types were possible)
• Removed the use of XOPData, to get rid of the XCF4J dependency
• Refactored the middleware abstraction layer to be independent of (but still contained in) XTT
• Add more support for updateable tasks

Bug Fixes¶

• Fix updateSpec for updateable tasks
• Fix origin setting in createDerived
• Fix xpath's in XCF server base classes to accept updates (regression)
• Handle edge cases when update is received before initiation (can happen due to message reordering in XCF)

Acknowledgements¶

The 2.0 release includes work by

• Jan Moringen
• Maikel Linke

ICL 6.xx¶

ICL 6.0.0 was introduced in May 2011. It came up with a whole new ICL-package called ICLMarkers. The new Marker package provides a very powerful marker detection framework, that is able to detect most common fiducial markers such as

• ARToolkit markers
• ARToolkit+/Studierstube-tracker (BCH coded) markers
• Hierarchical libfidtrack markers (Amoeba and others)
• ICL's special marker types

Fundamental new Featuers¶

• new package ICLMarkers for detection of all common fiducial marker types.
• brand new Implementation for the KinectGrabber that does not support all kinect image types (even IR)
• added ProcessMonitor + GUI component 'ps' that allows to show process information in real time
• added a complete new camera calibration tool that allows for marker based calibration
• added icl-show-scene tool, that allows to visualize a scene and different camera views
• added an implementation of an LLM (local linear map) network (+examples)
• added simple to use, but powerful blur function to the ICLQuick package
• added a new class: TemplateTracker
• added PylonGrabber for Basler GIG-E cameras (still experimental)
• improved prog-arg based grabber instantiation: now you can e.g. call "icl-camviewer -i dc 800@property=value"
• improved the ICLProject makefile system: installed libraries are now make-targets
• added a virtual customRender() method to the scene Object class
• added V42L based grabber for USB-webcam image sources
• reimplemented the DynColVector and the DynRowVector class

Smaller advancements¶

• added Levenberg Marquard optimization (+example)
• added superquadric fitting
• restructured ICLGeom's CoordinateFrame-scene object
• added smoothing to the ColorSegmentationOp class interface
• added stepped sliders to the Configurable GUI
• added convex hull computation for Point32fs
• added 3D-image rotation tool
• added new cast-method to ImgBase (e.g. image->as8u() ...)
• added scene.getAllCameras()
• added a new feature to the ImageRectification class to disable automatic point ordering and checking
• added 3 more possible types to the Configurable interface (int, float and string)
• added DynMatrix::big_matrix_pinv(...)
• added execute_process to the Quick API
• added TextTable utility class
• made setPropertyValue and getPropertyValue of Configurable mutable exclusive using a Mutex instance
• added DynMatrix:: saveCSV and loadCSV

(important) Bug-fixes¶

• removed Mutex::Locker(mutex) from the GenericGrabbers destructor
• fixed SteppingRange io
• fixed png-reader for 4 channel (rgba) images
• fixed an issue in the ColorSegmentationOp class that caused problems when loading LUTs with 16Bit size
• fixed bug in DynMatrix multiplication
• fixed ConfigFile creation
• fixed typo in IconFactory
• fixed missing implementation of Scene::getDrawCoordinateFrameEnabled
• fixed combo-box creation in the Configurable - GUI

The Wiki now contains basic information on installing, configuring and running RML. Go check it out!

btw, for those of you who knew about my plan to make all probes configurable through configuration commands: This is not currently available. You'll have to edit the configuration file directly. The syntax is ok, though, I hope, and all currently known options are documented in Running RML.

The BonSAI 0.9.1 release is out, which basically covers most of the changes from the robocup 2010 and some of the changes from RoboCup 2011.

This week, Jan Moringen and I worked together on a new XTT version, which now supports both the eXtensible Communication Framework (XCF), as well as the new Robotic Service Bus (RSB) framework, XCF's successor. While this new version did not undergo much testing so far, unit tests are running and the 2.0 beta can now be download in the Files section (or by clicking on the link).

The XCF version is backwards compatible on the network level, but there have been some slight API changes. Most importantly, instead of passing in an ActiveMemory, the service classes now expect TaskServerBus and TaskClientBus implementations matching the middleware used. For the release version, we will add a Factory that can construct the appropriate version automatically.

Requirements

When used with XCF, XTT requires XCF4J 1.3, Log4J, XOM, Jaxen, and our xmltools library. A bundle for these is available from the Files section. It also integrates with our FTS project, but this is not required.

When used with RSB, XTT requires rsb 0.4, rst, log4j, google protocol buffers, xom, and jaxen. All of these are also included in the dependency jar files in the Files section.