🚀 Distro 2024.08.0 Released

[Nicogene]

2024.08.0 Distro Announcement

Brief description of the announcement

Hello @robotology/everyone 👋

The iCub project is happy to announce our Software Distro 2024.08.0 📦

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.

Detailed context

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

🆕 Updates

🔘 creo2urdf: removed the axis-must-pass-through-csys limitation

In:

• Move the linkFrames in case of the axis of the joint does not pass through the csys icub-tech-iit/creo2urdf#106

We added the possibility to correctly export the URDF of assemblies that have joints' axis that not passing through any link frame.
This has been possible thanks to this PR in idyntree:

• Add moveLinkFramesToBeCompatibleWithURDFWithGivenBaseLink function idyntree#1193

Basically creo2urdf moves the link frames in case of the axis of the joint does not pass through the csys.

🔘 Runtime configuration of diagnostics related to the RX-DO-TX phases

In:

• Runtime configuration of diagnostics related to the RX-DO-TX phases icub-main#971

we added the xml parsing of configuration of the diagnostics associated to the execution loop and its transmission towards the ETH boards.

In particular, it will be possible to:

• enable / disable the diagnostics about execution overflow of the RX, DO and TX phases. The default is enabled.
• enable / disable the diagnostics about statistics of the RX, DO and TX phases. It will be reported minimum, average and maximum durations of the phases over a period configurable between 1 and 600 seconds. The default is disabled.

This latter feature is particularly useful when one wants to measure the effective duration of RX, DO and TX phases for a particular board over a period of time. As shown later It is possible to activate the section LOGGING.PERIODIC and set LOGGING.PERIODIC.emitRXDOTXstatistics = true to achieve such a statistics (min, average and max duration) over a period of time = LOGGING.PERIODIC.period seconds.

🔘 ycm-cmake-modules robotology-superbuild started using CMake's upstream ExternalProject

As discussed in https://github.com/orgs/robotology/discussions/712, the robotology-superbuild changed how it works.

From the user point of view, nothing should have changed, but given that the internal changes have been quite consistent,
there is the possibility that there have been some regressions that went unnoticed. If you experience any unexpected or
confusing behaviour, please open an issue at https://github.com/robotology/robotology-superbuild/issues .

👴 Deprecations

🔘 Remove embObjPSC and embObjMultiEnc

In:

• Remove embObjPSC and embObjMultiEnc icub-main#970
• Remove all the embObjPSC and embObjMultiEnc references robots-configuration#662

We removed embObjPSC and embObJMultiEnc since they uses the deprecated interface iAnalogSensor, and they are not used anymore.