ROBOT4SEN -- Robot control

Architecture

• main.py is the main entry point. It must be run on the computer acting as the supervision tablet.
• main.py creates (in this order):
  1. a QML-based interface for the control tablet.
  2. a bridge to the robot (instance of NaoqiBridge as defined in naoqibridge.py).
  3. a Flask server, that serves HTML content to be displayed on the robot's tablet. The Flask server lives in its own thread.
  4. a supervisor instance (as defined in supervisor.py), that lives in its own thread
• the bridge can communicate with the robot using the Python2 naoqi bindings; it also exposes QML objects that are used for the control tablet interface.
• however, none of the input modules (the control tablet, the robot tablet, or any other input methods) can directly execute commands on the robot. The commands they generate are enqueued and processed by the supervisor. Only the supervisor can execute actual command on the robot.
• However, reading data from the robot can be (and is) done directly by the other components (like the control tablet)
• communication between the input modules and the supervisor is done through a shared command queue (set in main.py)

In addition, the supervisor hosts a websocket server, to which the HTML page served to the robot connect. This is used to trigger content changes on the robot tablet.

Command flows

Running an activity

1. the child presses the button 'Tell a story'. This creates a request to /activity/stories/request to the Flask server
2. the /activity/stories Flask endpoint has been previsouly created by activities/stories/activity.py. The route callback push a STORIES command to the supervisor queue, to request the story activity to be started.
3. Supervisor decides to start the activity: it get the activity with get_activity(), and sets it as its active activity Supervisor.activity. Then, in Supervisor.run, it calls the tick() method of the activity at a set frequency, until tick() returns the status FINISHED or INTERRUPTED.

Pre-requisites

The project requires Python2 as the naoqi bindings do not support Python3.

• pip install pyside2 flask
• the naoqi python SDK

Running it

python2 main.py --ip <robot ip> --ssid <wifi network> --passwd <wifi passwd>

Check main.py --help for full list of options.

Network configuration

Due to how the Pepper tablet works, the following netwrok configuration is required:

• one wifi router, that acts as DHCP server
• configure the control laptop/tablet and the robot to connect to the Wifi
• configure Pepper's tablet and connect to the Wifi. For instance:

tablet = session.service("ALTabletService")
tablet.enableWifi()
tablet.configureWifi("open", "<ssid>", "") # last param is passwd, if using 'wpa'
tablet.connectWifi("<ssid>")
while tablet.getWifiStatus() != "CONNECTED":
    print(tablet.getWifiStatus())

• make sure the Flask server serves on 0.0.0.0

Upon startup, main.py will send the tablet the IP of the control laptop/tablet where the Flask server runs, to display the corresponding HTML content.

Using a direct, wired connection to the robot for debugging is fine once the system is fully started. If done too early, the control laptop default route might not lead to sending the Pepper's tablet the right Wifi IP, renderin the Flask server inaccessible.

Adding new behaviours

From choregraphe (attention: choregraphe 2.5 is required; does not work with 2.8), load the robots4sen package, add a new behaviour (via the big '+' icon in the Project files panel) and rename it as appropriate, implement the behaviour, upload it to the robot (from the Robot applications panel).

Next time you start the supervisor, your behaviour should be listed alongside the other ones (look for Available robots4SEN behaviours in the console).

Others

Pepper's tablet user-agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.0.4; ALY001LG Build/LPT-100SB) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.71 Mobile Crosswalk/10.39.235.15 Safari/537.36