🚀 Distro 2021.02 Released

[Nicogene]

Brief description of the announcement

Hello @robotology/everyone 👋

The iCub project is happy to announce our Software Distro 2021.02 📦

This is a major release that comprises binary packages as well. Therefore, follow the instructions available in our documentation to upgrade your system and/or download the new dependencies.

You can find the tags composing this distro in our Software Versioning Table.

The binaries cover the following platforms:

• Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic 64-bits.
• Ubuntu 20.04 Focal 64-bits.
• Debian 10 Buster 64-bits.
• Windows 10 64-bits.

Detailed context

This distro is shipped with several updates and fixes, including the ones listed hereafter:

🆕 Updates

The gazebo yarprobotinterface plugin

The yarprobotinterface gazebo plugin has been added to the gazebo-yarp-plugins family.
It permits to load of several YARP devices that can be attached to YARP devices
already opened by other Gazebo-YARP plugins using the same XML format used by the yarprobotinterface tool and the libYARP_robotinterface C++ library.

Here is the dedicated documentation for further details.

App deployment: Supervised Camera Calibration

The Supervised Camera Calibration link has been added to our robot-bazaar
It will guide you in calibrating iCub cameras, by providing visual guidelines. You will have to place the chessboard into the bounding box shown on a display.

Here is the application in action:

SupervCameraCalib.mp4

iDynTree new C++ Visualizer library

The 2021.02 distribution as part of the ROBOTOLOGY_ENABLE_DYNAMICS includes the new iDynTree 3.0 release, that enabled by default support for the iDynTree visualizer, a simple C++ visualizer library for your robot models. Furthermore, all the necessary environment variables are now set to automatically load the meshes of iCub URDF models.

To use it from C++ you just need a small snippet of code:

iDynTree::ModelLoader mdlLoader;
bool ok = mdlLoader.loadModelFromFile(urdf_filename);

iDynTree::Visualizer viz;
viz.addModel("modelToVisualize", mdlLoader.model());

viz.view()

Thanks a lot to @S-Dafarra and @GiulioRomualdi from Dynamic Interaction Control that worked on this feature, and to @Giulero and the iRonCub team for the fancy animation.

Gazebo command on Windows

The 2021.02 distro introduces a convenient change: if you are using the Gazebo simulator on Windows, now you can simply launch it by running the gazebo command as done on Linux and macOS, without the need to run gzserver and gzclient as separate commands as it was necessary until now.

👴 Deprecations

icub-gazebo deprecation in favor of icub-models

The Gazebo models contained in the icub-gazebo repository served as well for many years, but now all their functionalities are also provided by the models contained in icub-models.

For this reason, the 2021.02 distro official deprecates the icub-gazebo repo, which will be removed from the distro in the 2021.05 release.