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SIC

SIC is a framework for quickly getting started with social robotics by making it simple to combine complex devices such as Nao’s and powerful services such as Google Dialogflow.

Getting started with SIC consists of a few basic steps:

1. Installing SIC

2. Starting Redis and SIC on your device

3. Start your program to control the robot

Installation

You can find the instructions on how to install the framework here: Install.

Setup

Once installed to all devices you want to use, we can start the framework.

This consists of two (or three) steps:

1. Start Redis

2. (Optional) Start a service, such as face detection

3. Run your program

Starting Redis on your laptop

To enable communication between all your devices, we have to start Redis server. Make sure Redis is always up and running when you run any demos.

Ubuntu / Debian / macOS

# Navigate to the repo where you cloned the sic_applications
cd sic_applications 

# Start the Redis server
redis-server conf/redis/redis.conf

If you encounter the error Could not create server TCP listening socket *:6379: bind: Address already in use., please use the following command to stop the Redis server first

sudo systemctl stop redis-server.service

And, if you wish to prevent Redis server from starting automatically at boot, you can run

sudo systemctl disable redis-server.service

If you still can’t kill Redis server, you can use ps aux | grep redis-server command to find the PID (process ID) of the Redis server. And, terminate the process using kill PID

Windows

The commands here are for the Command Prompt:

# Navigate to the repo where you cloned the sic_applications
cd sic_applications 

# Start the Redis server
cd conf\redis
redis-server.exe redis.conf

It means that port 6379 is already in use, probably by a previous instance of the Redis server that is still running in the background. You can either leave it as it is, or if you really want to kill it and restart the server, find the PID and kill the program.

Running a demo

To start a demo, for example to show nao’s camera output on your screen, simply execute a python script. Some demos are available in the sic_applications /demosThis guide assumes you already followed the steps here Getting started.

For example, to show the camera feed of the robot:

...

To start the camera demo from the terminal, use the following commands.

Ubuntu / Debian / macOS

# Activate the same virtual environment where you pip installed 
# social-interaction-cloud in the installation steps
source venv_sic/bin/activate

# Go to sic_applications and the demo script
cd sic_applications/demos
python demo_nao_camera.py

Windows

# Activate the same virtual environment where you pip installed 
# social-interaction-cloud in the installation steps
.\.venv_sic\Scripts\activate

# Go to sic_applications and the demo script
cd sic_applications\demos
python demo_nao_camera.py

...