Software related issues. Francesco Nori Cognitive Humanoids Laboratory Robotics Brain & Cognitive Sciences Italian Institute of Technology (Italy)

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1 Software related issues Francesco Nori Cognitive Humanoids Laboratory Robotics Brain & Cognitive Sciences Italian Institute of Technology (Italy)

2 Motivation Reasons (robotic specific): 1. Hardware and students change rapidly (especially in robotics); 2. Lack of reward in making reusable code; Assumption: we want to break this loop in order to advance research in robotics. Solution: yet to be found but may be open source!

3 Publish or perish Successful researchers learn to maximize the number of published papers: Loss of work and knowledge code is lost implementation details get lost but maybe the implementation details are what made the algorithm work!

4 Some questions How much time does it take to implement an algorithm from a paper? Does it always work? How difficult it is to choose the algorithms that work best?

5 Serious problems

6 Serious problems Lack of reward for producing reusable code

7 Serious problems Lack of reward for producing reusable code No mechanism for promoting successful software components

8 Serious problems Lack of reward for producing reusable code No mechanism for promoting successful software components Difficulty to compare experiments

9 Serious problems Lack of reward for producing reusable code No mechanism for promoting successful software components Difficulty to compare experiments No incremental progress

10 Serious problems Lack of reward for producing reusable code No mechanism for promoting successful software components Difficulty to compare experiments No incremental progress Our students tend to get stuck in simple problems

11 Reusability -> Simplification But open source is not just about getting access to the source codes source code per-se might require software gurus in order to be reused. We need to simplify the way code can be (re)used: 1. Documentation. 2. Common interfaces. 3. Automatic handling dependencies (in different OS).

12 our tools for sharing code (1/3) 1. the software repository

13 our tools for sharing code (2/3) ITALK software documentation List of modules WorldSim library yarpshinx cartesianremapper icubsimulator evolutionprocess

14 our tools for sharing code (3/3) Integrated demos: Demo1 (IIT, UP and CNR) Demo2 (UH, BIEL and USD) but demos sharing so far hasn t be addressed

15 Simplifying complexity

16 Simplification -> Modularity

17 The Manager The application manager is a python script that provides a graphic interface to yarprun. It allows to start/stopping/monitor, redirect I/O. In addition it automates establishing connections between modules..xml

18 Running processes remotely yarprun is a server that waits for commands on a port start/termination/kill monitor lifecycle 1. Starting a server: $node1: yarprun server /node1 run a server, which will wait for commands on /machine1 2. Execute a command, from node2: $node2: yarprun --on /node1 --as TAG --cmd COMMAND [ARGLIST] 3. Other commands: $node3: yarprun --on /node1 --isrunning TAG $node3: yarprun --on /node1 --sigterm TAG $node3: yarprun --on /node1 --as TAG --cmd COMMAND --stdio /node2 more info in the YARP documentation :

19 How are parameters organized Parameters of module are organized in a directory called app. Each entry inside app store parameters for using a module in a certain way (context). The ResourceFinder class in yarp helps to detect these files (resources) ce_finder_basic.html ce_finder_advanced.html

20 Demo software infrastructure: 3D -> 2D eye2world: converts 2D image plane positions into 3D world positions. icubdemo2010motorif: executes actions on objects, given their 3D world position. Example of actions: touch, tap, grasp. With these modules perception is in 2D (objects are assumed to be on a table) but actions is still 10D (3D on torso + 7D on right arm). Learning might be cumbersome w.r.t. the simulations in (Tuci et al.).

21 Demo software infrastructure: visual processing pf3dtracker: tracks spherical objects on the image plane starting from their color histograms. Gives their 2D position on the image plane Visual appearance model

22 Demo software infrastructure: touch sensors graspdetector: detects the presence of a contact at the fingers. Does not use fingertip sensors but just the hand position sensors (available in icub v1.1).

23 Demo software infrastructure: missing modules Joint limits binary sensors: Speech recognition: Speech synthesizer: Effect detector? Continuous time recurrent neural network (RNN)?

24 Summary Require additional work Module Documentation Dependencies Application manager compatibility eye2world icubdemo2010motorif pf3dtracker graspdetector speechrecognition??? recursiveneuralnetwork? Aquila?? speechsynthesizer??? effectdetector???