Introduction
Laptops/Computers are referred to as a device where a particular device is compromised of sensors and actuators. 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 where each driver is a JAR file.
Microphone -
computer-microphone
Speaker -
computer-speaker
Camera -
computer-camera
Dependencies
The independent usage of sensors and actuators does not have any dependencies besides running the respective drivers themselves. However, there are two cases where you might have dependencies:
Communication with robot/s: Considering that the intention is to emulate a robot’s responses on your device, and not use an actual robot, you must first launch
computer-robot
. Thereafter depending on the context of your usage, you might need to run the required sensors/actuators drivers. This is not required if you working with robots such as Pepper/Nao.Using a web browser: In order to do so, you must launch
computer-browser
as well as the webserver service. Depending on the context of your usage, you might need to run the required sensors/actuators for that particular use case.
How to Use
An example will be used to demonstrate where these drivers come in handy. Assume one wishes to use sentiment analysis strictly on a laptop/computer, in order to do so you will need to launch the following JAR files to communicate with the SIC framework: computer-microphone
and computer-robot
. Kindly note there are other services required to run the sentiment-analysis service, for more information please visit the service page.
The drivers have been provided in JAR in the format computer-*. To use these JARs, you need to have Java 8 or later 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 dialog that appears. The full list of available drivers is as follows:
computer-browser
: automatically launches a Chrome window that displays the page as rendered by the webserver service. See Tablets/Phones/Browsers for more information.computer-camera
: can feed the video of the webcam on your machine into the framework.computer-microphone
: can feed the audio of the microphone on your machine into the framework.computer-robot
: emulates the responses (mainly events) that a Nao or Pepper robot would generate.computer-speakers
: uses eSpeak for local text-to-speech and plays generic audio too.
Limitations
The available drivers work as intended on Linux and Windows. Currently, the drivers do not function as intended on Macintosh.