🚀 Distro 2022.02.0 Released

[Nicogene]

2022.02.0 Distro Announcement

Brief description of the announcement

Hello @robotology/everyone 👋

The iCub project is happy to announce our Software Distro 2022.02.0 📦

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 18.04 Bionic 64-bits.
• Debian 10 Buster 64-bits.

The conda binaries cover the following platforms:

• Linux x64 64-bits.
• Windows 10 x64 64-bits.
• macOS x64 64-bits.

Detailed context

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

🆕 Updates

🔘 Upgraded some specific robots to the use of the latest NWS/NWC layers

For details, see:

• Upgrade robots to the latest NWS/NWC layers - 1 robots-configuration#321

🔘 Fixed the encoder consistency test

The coupling matrices are now retrieved online directly from the robot avoiding possible mismatches among the content of the robot configuration files and the test initialization files.

• The problem was reported in Encoder Consistency test - hip pitch joint gear ratio robots-configuration#252.
• The fix landed in MotorEconders-consistency - retrieve the coupling matrix at runtime icub-tests#60.

🔘 blenderController robot-bazaar application

The blenderCotroller application has been added to robot-bazaar 🚀

It is now possible to easily deploy the blenderRCBPanel using the RAPID deployment system, you can control/animate your iCub through Blender in few clicks. ✨

[traversaro]

Extra Updates

🔘 robotology-distro and robotology-distro-all conda metapackages

As an experimental feature, from the 2022.02.0 distro we provide also the robotology-distro conda metapackage, that simplifies the process of installing the packages that you want to install at the version specified by a given distro.

With robotology-distro, if somebody wanted for example to install yarp, icub-main, gazebo-yarp-plugins and icub-models corresponding to the 2022.02.0 distro, they could do it easily by doing

mamba install -c conda-forge -c robotology robotology-distro=2022.02.0 yarp icub-main  gazebo-yarp-plugins icub-models

Note that in this case the robotology-distro package is empty, and so the user needs anyhow to specify the packages that needs to be installed. If instead a user wants to install all the packages that are part of a robotology distro, the robotology-distro-all package can be installed:

mamba install -c conda-forge -c robotology robotology-distro-all=2022.02.0

Until the 2022.02.0 distro, what was suggested is that the user need to manually inspect the tables in https://icub-tech-iit.github.io/documentation/sw_versioning_table/ to extract the version for each package that they need, but we hope that the new feature is more user friendly.

As this is an experimental feature, it is for now only available on Windows and Linux, and not on macOS.