Getting started

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:

Installing SIC on your device
Installing SIC on your robot
Starting Redis and SIC on your device
Starting SIC on your robot
Start your SICApplication 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.

Starting SIC on your laptop

To enable communication between all your devices, we have to start Redis on some device. Start it on your laptop in the root framework sic folder (for MacOS and Windows: make sure Docker Desktop is running).

cd your/path/to/sic
docker compose up redis

This should start print Container sic-redis-1 Created which means Redis is up and running.

Starting SIC on the Robot

Notes on windows installation

This script sets environment variables and start the framework on the robot. However, running scripts on windows is not very simple. If you cannot execute the scripts by calling them from a powershell terminal, open them using a text editor and copy the commands into the terminal manually. Remember to adjust variables such as IP addresses

In a new terminal, start the framework on the robot using

cd sic/sic_framework/scripts/
sh ./start_robot.sh -h ROBOT_IP -n ROBOT_DEVICE_ID -b REDIS_IP

# Windows:
.\start_robot.ps1 ROBOT_IP ROBOT_DEVICE_ID REDIS_IP

Where:

ROBOT_IP is the adress of the Nao or Pepper robot
ROBOT_DEVICE_ID can be any name as it is the device_id with which the robot will identify itself in the framework.
REDIS_IP Your laptop IP address (use ipconfig on windows or hostname -I on linux or ipconfig getifaddr en0 on mac)

Example command:

sh ./start_robot.sh -h 192.168.0.116 -n nao1 -b 192.168.0.181

# Windows
.\start_robot.ps1 192.168.0.116 nao1 192.168.0.181

This should show an output like

nao@nao:~/sic/sic_framework/devices$ python nao.py --robot_name nao1
Starting service manager with device id "nao1" with services:
 - NaoqiMicrophone
 - TopNaoCamera
 - BottomNaoCamera
Starting service manager with device id "nao1" with services:
 - NaoMotionReplayAction
 - NaoMotionRecorderAction
 - NaoMotionAction
 - NaoMotionStreamConsumer
 - NaoqiTextToSpeechAction
 - NaoMotionStreamProducer
 - NaoqiTabletService

Running a demo

To start a demo, for example to show pepper’s camera output on your screen, simply execute a python script with a SICApplication. Some demo’s are available in the docker/sic/sic_framework/tests folder.

Terminal

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

cd docker/sic/sic_framework/tests

export DB_IP=localhost
export DB_PASS=changemeplease

python3 demo_camera.py

Pycharm

The enviornment variables (the export command in the code above) need to be set. If you are using Pycharm to run the script, set these in the Run/Debug configuration in the Environment variables menu. Copy these two lines into the menu:

DB_IP=localhost
DB_PASS=changemeplease

If all went well, a display should pop up showing you the camera output of your robot!

API

The goal of SIC is to provide easy to use high level access to devices and services. To make a NAO robot say something, follow the startup instruction in https://socialrobotics.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CBSR/pages/2180415493/Install#Starting-SIC-on-the-Robot and run the following python script on your laptop.

ENV VARIABLES

from sic_framework import SICApplication
from sic_framework.devices.common_naoqi.naoqi_speakers import NaoqiTextToSpeechAction, NaoqiTextToSpeechRequest


class DemoTextToSpeech(SICApplication):
    def run(self):
        nao3_action = self.connect(NaoqiTextToSpeechAction, device_id='nao1')
        nao3_action.request(NaoqiTextToSpeechRequest("Hello world!"))


if __name__ == '__main__':
    test_app = DemoTextToSpeech()
    test_app.run()