Research for Cognitive Interaction

The Remote Sensor Actuator Interface (ReSAI) allows the remote introspection via external devices, e.g. android phones. It enables to aquire information about internal data and processes from software elements of a complex and/or distributed system such as robots (e.g. BIRON/ToBI or iCub). ReSAI was developed for further extension in terms of additional information channels or different client architectures and is now open source!

Thanks to Mohamad Aein from BCCN Goettingen, some changes were made. Especially, now a fri_okc_hostconfig.h will allow to set some global settings to all the binary helper programs that come with OpenKC.

Enjoy!

Additional Features and Improvements¶

• Adapted the SmartPtr and SmartArray classes to allow for better behavior with inherited types
• Added new undistortion handling, by now providing not only the simple undistortion model that was suggested by the ARToolkit guys, but also the much more sophisticated Matlab camera calibration toolkit model
• Added new helper scripts to facilitate build configuration. The new package does now
  also provide a ./configure script that can be set up with a very simple configuration file
• the former helper script scripts/icl-cmake.sh was renamed and is deprecated now
• Added several improvements to the KinectGrabber class
• Added an extra script called scripts/config-generator.sh that creates build-directories for several common dependency configurations (all dependencies, no dependencies, all except each dependency and each dependency alone)
• Added new Configurable property type called 'flag'. Flags represent boolean values and are translated to checkboxes in the Configurable-GUI component
• Added native support for writing and loading png-images even without ImageMagick
  based on libpng.so and png.h (therefore libpng became a new optional dependency)
• added the global extract_euler_angle function to FixedMatrix.h that allows to extract
  euler angles from a given NxM rotation matrix (N>2 and M>2)

Bugfixes¶

• Fixed include statement in CC.h
• Several fixes in the build-system and CMake files for several dependency configurations
• Fixed issue, that ICLQt was built even without having OpenGL
• Fixed static initialization issue for the ImageMagick wrapper for file loading and saving
• Fixed check-box to string and back GUI-assignment operators
• Fixed bug in Configurable: addChildConfigurable does now only add those properties from the child, that are not deactivated

The new version of ICL provides the following features and bug fixes:

• Added extra makefile variable ARCHITECTURE_DEPENDENT_BUILD. The build uses g++'s '-march=native' only if this is explicitly set to TRUE
• Added 'visible'-flag to the SceneObject class (this can be used to hide/show SceneObject instances)
• Replaced former SimpleMatrix<T> class by a new class called Array2D that provides the same features, but uses a more intuitive interface and row-major memory layout
• Added new GUI components for forcing certain image parameters when images are published using the built-in gui-tab 'capture'
• extended console-progress methods
• added -rotate to the 'icl-convert' tool
• added built-in superquadrics visualization (SceneObject can now also be superquadrics)
• applied some fundamental changes in the Grabber class

• removed former desired-params related methods
• restructured the way images are created
• replaced const ImgBase*grabUD(ImgBase**dst) by const ImgBase*acquireImage()
• acquireImage does no longer have to care about desired parameters -> it only creates a new image
• the Grabber's grab()-method does now care automatically for using desired parameters
• The user can also choose to use only one or two of the desired parameters rather than

all or none of them

• desired parameters are now set using template methods (T can be depth, format and Size)

• void useDesired<T>(const T&)
• void ignoreDesired<T>()
• T getDesired<T>() const
• bool desiredUsed<T>() const

• Fixed canny edge detector
• Fixed copy constructor in ButtonHandle class
• some makefile dependent fixes regarding GLX support
• Fixed transparency issues in the scene class
• Fixed SceneObject::setColor bug
• some code cleanup in the Widget class
• Added some heuristics to enhance the robustness for exporting image from the GUI tab 'capture'
• fixed non-gui mode of icl-pipe
• some fixed in the documentation's style.css
• fixed throw-list in the PoseEstimator class (the list was not complete, which sometimes caused std::bad_exceptions)
• some OSX-build related fixes

The new version of ICL provides the following features and bug fixes:

• New class called Hit that represents Intersections between SceneObjects and ViewRays
• Optimized scene- object picking including methods to get all objects that are intersected by a given view ray
• New method to render use an ICL-image as OpenGL texture, that is put on a quad
• Added scalable text visualization to the DrawWidget class (negative text sizes now indicate that the text size is given in image-pixels instead of in screen pixels. Therefore the text size is scaled in zoom mode)
• Added static methods Any::ptr to encode/decode pointers as instances of type Any
• Added direct pointer assignment methods to the SmatrPtr and SmartArray classes

• Fixed Scene's off-screen rendering mechanism, that now works on most Linux machines
• Several fixed and optimizations for object picking
• fixes in the makefile system regarding libfreenect and GLX support
• Textures are not illuminated correctly
• Bug fixes in the ConfigFile class (now entries can be overwritten correctly)
• Fixed 2 serious bugs in the Camera's ViewRay computation
• Several further bug fixes regarding GLX-support

• added new property to DCGrabber
• added basic Mac-OSX Support
• minor improvements in icl-pipe
• extened ICLGeom's Scene and SceneObject class in order to provide a scene graph implementation
• applied some major improvements to the camera calibration tool icl-cam-calib (cameras can now be calibrated without a calibration object by manually associating world coordinates to image points
• replaced ICLGeoms fallback ImgQ-rendering pipeline by a much more sophisticated rendering method that uses hardware accelerated off-screen rendering
• changed the SceneObjects normal storage
• added lights to the Scene class (these can be used to defined OpenGL light-properties)
• removed redundant methods for setting the default view-port in instances of ICLWidget and it's subclasses (the new method is called setViewPort)
• Added linear-interpolating index-operator to the Channel-class template
• Added a method to specify DC-Cameras by their unique model ID
• Added a method to pick objects in Scenes

Bug fixes:

• fixed initialization of the CamCfgWidget's components
• added some 64bit fixes
• reimplemented libfreenect wrapper by using libfreenect's C-interface

Version 5.11.0 was a frequently changed developmental version. The new stable version is 5.12.0.

• Added a Function<..>-template that will be integrated as common callback type. The function template can wrap global functions as well as member functions.
• Extended the ICLGeom:ViewRay class (which now provides methods to compute distances to 3D-points and other ViewRays).
• added very basic support templates sqr -> power of two and power<exponent>
• Fundamentally improved ICL's camera calibration tool icl-cam-calib

• simplified GUI
• cleaned up interface
• modularized implementation (added extra classes CalibrationObject and CalibrationGrid)
• added manual mode that can be used to define the reference points using mouse

• added a quite useful utility class that implements the default mouse event handler. The DefineRectanglesMouseHandler can be used to define a set of rectangles (e.g. an image ROI) as an image overlay
• Added an implementation of the ICP (Iterative Closest Point) Algorithm
• Added an implementation of KD-Trees (used in ICP, but also available as utility class that is integrated with ICL's DynMatrix class)
• Updated the way camera-instances are visualized in Scenes (we now use a more or less schematic view that visualizes a part of the cameras view frustum)
• Added a new utility class called icl::Any. Instances of this class can be created from everything, and they can be casted to anything
• added a very useful method to the Grabber::interface that provides a mechanism to automatically adapt result images
• Added support for ICL's Kinect Device. The color camera can be accessed by using the GenericGrabber parameters 'kinectc DEVICE_ID' the depth cameras with 'kinectd DEVICE_ID'.
• Replaced ICL's selfmade XML-parser by a pugi-XML-based version
• Added PseudoColorConverter class to the ICLCC package
• Added global utility-functions openFileDialog and closeFileDialog to the ICLQuick header (of course this is only available with Qt-Support)
• Added an interface to set a cameras near-clipping plane to values even shorter than the Cameras focal length
• Optimized ICL's ICLProject makefile system (note: you can create an ICL-Project makefile tree using icl-create-project ProjectName)

• added install lists for targets that have to be installed to bin and etc
• enabled local linking for the development tree and global linking for the installed version. By this means, you'll no longer have to call 'make installlink' before you can run your local applications'

• Added a GUI compoment called "color()" color compoments can be used to define a color at runtime internally using a pop-uped QColorDialog instance
• Added a new and very powerful interface called Configurable. Configurable instances have a string-based interface for internal properties that allows for automatic creation of corresponding GUI-components.

• A Configurables GUI can be embedded using the new "prop(..)"-GUI-component

• fixed icl-pipe that could not be build without Qt before
• fixed some build-issues with OpenCV
• added post-install build-target to adapt the installation trees write permissions to group-writable
• OpenCVCamGrabber now uses desired parameters
• Many minor fixes in the makefile system
• A lot of further minor fixes

• Full integration of Carsten Schürmanns Myrmex tactile device
  (simply use icl-camviewer -input myr 0 to grab images)
• new embedded GUI component 'color' that can be used to conveniently
  choose a color at runtime
• new lookup-table function 'lut' was directly integrated into the Img<T>
  template class
• new PseudoColorConverter class was added to the ICLCC package

• fixed overlayed rendering of rectangles
  (these were shifted by dx=dy=0.5 pixels before)
• fixed some documentation issues
• fixed problem with icl-create-project script in particular, when the script
  is called with the --update option
• further minor fixes

This version comes up with several bug fixes and and a new powerful Configurable interface. Configurable-instances can easily be linked to automatically created GUI components.

I am somewhat proud to announce release of Version 1.0.0. Thanks to Michael Gerung from Kuka Roboter GmbH we were able to resolv the last issues. Also, the performance improved, as we have generally faster command processing and fewer errors from the robot. This is a recommended update to all users of 9.2.0 and 9.2.1.

The update also features some better documentation, although there is enough room left for improvement ;-)

Enjoy and Happy-OpenKC-ing everyone