🚀 Distro 2022.11.0 Released

[Nicogene]

2022.11.0 Distro Announcement

Brief description of the announcement

Hello @robotology/everyone 👋

The iCub project is happy to announce our Software Distro 2022.11.0 📦

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 apt binaries cover the following platforms:

• Ubuntu 20.04 Focal 64-bits.
• Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy 64-bits.
• Debian 10 Buster 64-bits.

Detailed context

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

🆕 Updates

🔘 Fixed icub-main Unit Tests on Windows

We fixed the CI infrastruture that performs unit testing in Windows through the following PR:

• Fix for Unittest on Windows icub-main#830

🔘 Added support for AksIM2

We introduced the necessary code for dealing with the AkSIM2 absolute encoder device, which will replace the AMO in the near future.

🔘 Published the models underlying the AMCBLDC FW

We made publicly available the ensemble of models we developed to generate the FW of the AMCBLDC board. For reference:

• AMCBLDC icub-firmware-models#4

🔘 Renewed iCubLisboa01 (SN004) 🤖

We received from our friends in Lisbon the iCub SN004 and renewed it in some parts. See:

• https://github.com/robotology/robots-configuration/releases/tag/v1.27.0

🔘 Delivered iCubGenova11 to HSP@IIT (SN050) 🤖

See:

• Add iCubGenova11 robots-configuration#399

🔘 Refactored versioning of iCub::iKin::iKinLimb (⚠️ breaking change ⚠️)

We had to refactor the way iCub::iKin::iKinLimb was versioned by relying on a the dedicated component iKinLimbVersion capable of dealing with semantic versions expressed in the form "vX.Y" (as strings).

More information can be found at:

• Fix handling of limbs versions in iKin icub-main#839

This is a ⚠️ breaking change as it caused the upgrade of the internal protocols used by the Cartesian and Gaze interfaces as well as the handling of the version retrieved via the getInfo() service as per the changes propagated to the downstream projects:

• Patch iKin versioning stereo-vision#36
• Patch iKin versioning icub-basic-demos#38

Also, the Gaze controller (aka iKinGazeCtrl) command line parameter head_version changed its syntax triggering a ⚠️ mandatory update of the robot configuration files as per:

• [iKinGazeCtrl] patch versioning robots-configuration#397

Therefore, to use this distro with your robot, you need to proceed with updating/aligning the robot configuration files.

👴 Deprecations

🔘 ⚠️ This is the last distro shipped with iCub_SIM ⚠️

Our old yet beloved simulator iCub_SIM is somewhat aged and we have been using Gazebo for long by now. Although iCub_SIM is deprecated de facto, we have been trying hard to make it build still against our latest developments¹.

However, maintaining iCub_SIM alive has become costly for us; that is why we took the decision to officially remove it from our software bundle starting with the upcoming distro².

Therefore, this is the last distro including iCub_SIM. We recommend that you consider undertaking the necessary steps to port your code/experiments to the use of Gazebo.

Footnotes

1. See https://github.com/robotology/icub-main/pull/808 ↩

2. See https://github.com/robotology/icub-main/issues/842#issuecomment-1327388046 ↩