Generic YARP Driver for Haptic Devices

Installation of Physical Drivers

Geomagic Touch Drivers and API

Download the Geomagic Touch drivers and the SDK for your platform following the links at https://3dssupport.microsoftcrmportals.com/knowledgebase/article/KA-01405/en-us and follow the enclosed instructions.

In Windows, the environment variable OH_SDK_BASE should be set by the installer pointing to the location where the driver and the SDK are installed.

In Linux, remember to set LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8 in the environment, prior to pairing the device. This will make the driver work outside US.

Dependencies for the YARP device driver and the examples

• YARP
• icub-contrib-common (only for examples and tests)

Compiling and Installing the YARP plugins

1. Set up the building project by means of cmake. If you need to compile some physical drivers you need, remember to enable the relative CMake variable, e.g. ENABLE_geomagicdriver.
2. Compile and install the project.
3. Set up the environment variable hapticdevice_DIR pointing where the project gets installed (should be the same path used for CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX).
4. Append to the environment variable YARP_DATA_DIRS the path $hapticdevice_DIR/share/hapticdevice.

Running the YARP plugins

First, check whether the YARP drivers got installed correctly.

Therefore, launch: yarpdev --list

and see if hapticdevicewrapper, hapticdeviceclient, geomagicdriver are listed down.

You can then run the driver in two ways. For example, for the geomagicdriver it holds:

1. yarpdev --device geomagicdriver [option-list]
2. yarprobotinterface --context geomagic --config geomagic.xml

The available options are:

• device-id "id": a string with the name of the physical device that has been instantiated.
• name "port-stem-name": a string specifying the ports stem-name (hapticdevice by default).
• period period: an integer that specifies the period in ms (20 ms by default).
• verbosity level: an integer accounting for the enabled verbosity level (0 by default).

In case the yarprobotinterface deployer is chosen, then the options are all contained in the corresponding xml files that are installed in $hapticdevice_DIR/share/hapticdevice/context path and possibly customized using the yarp-config tool.

Connecting to the YARP driver

A YARP module that wants to connect to an haptic device needs to contain the following instructions:

C++ code

#include <yarp/os/Property.h>
#include <yarp/dev/PolyDriver.h>
#include <yarp/dev/IHapticDevice.h>

yarp::os::Property option;
option.put("device","hapticdeviceclient");  // device name
option.put("remote","/hapticdevice");       // or whatever wrapper stem-name
option.put("local","/local-port");          // any local ports stem-name

yarp::dev::PolyDriver driver;
driver.open(option);

yarp::dev::IHapticDevice *ihap;
driver.view(ihap);

Read YARP documentation to find out more about IHapticDevice interface.

Client Examples

Guidelines for contributing

Authors

• Ugo Pattacini:
  • hapticdevicewrapper
  • hapticdeviceclient
• Manuelito Scola:
  • geomagicdriver

License

Material included here is Copyright of iCub Facility - Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and is released under the terms of the GPL v2.0 or later. See the file LICENSE for details.