KeepAlive and other stories

RECENT UPDATE:

I ended up pushing this code to GitHub finally and it’s at this commit


Today, along with Abrar I implemented a KeepAlive mechanism for the chairbots so that they don’t fall asleep while waiting for an input. I haven’t pushed the code for it to the GitHub repo yet because we are still working on organizing the code in the repo and the chairs but the fix was tested successfully and then documented in the bug report that we created.

Working on this fix made us realize that the Neato driver that we are using with ROS is around 4 year old! There have been many new things since it was created, like the capability to PlaySound which isn’t in the original driver that is documented on ROS. We could add this capability though I would like to first look at all the forks of it so that we don’t end up re-inventing the wheel.

In another news, I have finally finished the LaTeX draft for the demo proposal for HRI. We also figured a way last week to run the VR demo using just Steam. We were able to do it on Windows but getting it working on Linux is still a problem on the Predator laptop.

Finally, I am able to glide from at least 10 feet away from the edge of the swimming pool.