Laptop/Computers

Introduction

Laptops/Computers provide a large number of functionalities for the SIC framework. They can be used as stand-alone devices, as emulators for Pepper/Nao robots , or as Tablets/Phones/Browsers .

In order to collect and send data to and from the SIC framework, drivers have been provided to emulate the various sensors and actuators used in SIC.

Sensors and Actuators

The following sensors and actuators have been provided in the following format: Sensor/Actuator - driver name (if applicable).

• Microphone - computer-microphone.jar

• Camera - computer-camera.jar

• Browser - computer-browser.jar

  • the driver automatically launches a Chrome window that displays the page as rendered by the webserver service. See Tablets/Phones/Browsers for more information.

• Speaker - computer-speaker.jar

  • The driver uses eSpeak for text-to-speech. Windows and Linux have it by default, however, macOS does not. Therefore install eSpeak from brew: brew install espeak.

  • can be used for generic audio playing, as well as text-to-speech with eSpeak

• Robot - computer-robot.jar

  • can be used for emulating Pepper/Nao robots

The drivers are run from the https://bitbucket.org/socialroboticshub/docker/src/master/sic-local/ folder and have been provided as a JAR in the format computer-*. To run them, Java 8 or later is required to be installed on your machine. Launch one of the local devices by either double-clicking or using the BAT (Windows) or SH (Linux/Mac) file. With a locally running SIC framework you can always just press OK in the initial dialogbox that appears.

Dependencies

The independent usage of sensors and actuators do not have any dependencies by themselves. Instead, services are dependent on them. So, depending on the services run, the necessarily sensor/actuator should be used.

How to Use

An example will be used to demonstrate how these drivers are used. Assume https://bitbucket.org/socialroboticshub/connectors/src/master/python/tts_example.py needs to be run.

1. start Docker with the required text_to_speech service

2. start computer-robot.jar, computer-speakers.jar

   • Important: If you are operating on a MacBook, kindly ensure you launch these drivers on a terminal.

   • the https://bitbucket.org/socialroboticshub/connectors/src/master/python/tts_example.py emulates Text-to-Speech on a robot; hence we need to use both a robot emulator and the speakers as actuators.

3. run https://bitbucket.org/socialroboticshub/connectors/src/master/python/tts_example.py

Limitations

The available drivers have been tested on Windows 10 and Ubuntu 22.04. macOS can also be used but has not been as extensively tested and compatibility and support for it are limited.