/BioTacSP_setup

Primary LanguageCGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

Biotac SP ROS

This repository is for hosting the Biotac SP sensors sofware released under the lgpl3.0 license. This repo is originally duplicated and modified from this repo

Requirements

Documentation

Hardware

  • 3x Biotac SP sensors
  • Biotac Board
  • micro-USB power cable for connecting the Biotac board
  • Cheetah SPI host
  • USB-B cable.
  • Host pc

Software

Installation procedure:

Step 1: Connect the equipment

Figure 1 shows the configuration setup

Figure 1: Biotac setup

Step 2: Update the OS and install base packets

$ sudo apt update & sudo apt upgrade -y & sudo apt dist-upgrade -y & sudo apt autoremove -y & sudo apt autoclean -y
$ sudo apt install build-essential git terminator

Step 3: clone the repository

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src
$ git clone https://github.com/RuihanGao/BioTacSP_setup

Step 4: install the drivers

$ cd ~/Desktop/BioTacSP_ws/src/BioTacSP_setup
$ ./installCheetahDriver.sh

Step 5: compile and install

$ cd ~/Desktop/BioTacSP_ws
$ catkin_make
$ source devel/setup.sh

Step 6: run

Run terminator (in slayer conda environment, which is installed with empy, rospkg, and opencv-python)

$ roslaunch biotac_sp_ros biotac.launch

Understanding the data

4x data frames are colected per second. Each frame is composed follows the recommended Dafault sampling sequence.

Figure 2 shows the Default Sampling Sequence

Figure 2: Default sampling sequence

Table 1: Bandwidth and Sampling rate for Default Sampling Sequence at 4.4kHz

Figure 3 shows the Biotac SP electrodes distribution

Figure 3 Biotac SP electrodes distribution

The output is a vector of 163 columns where:

[time, E1_s01, PAC_s01, E2_s01, PAC_s01,...,E24_s01, PAC_s01, PDC_s01, PAC_s01, PAC_s01, TAC_s01, PAC_s01, TDC_s01, PAC_s01, E1_s02, PAC_s02, E2_s02, PAC_s02,...,E24_s02, PAC_s02, PDC_s02, PAC_s02, PAC_s02, TAC_s02, PAC_s02, TDC_s02, PAC_s02, E1_s03, PAC_s03, E2_s03, PAC_s03,...,E24_s03, PAC_s03, PDC_s03, PAC_s03, PAC_s03, TAC_s03, PAC_s03, TDC_s03, PAC_s03]

where:

s01 - sensor 1

s02 - sensor 2

s03 - sensor 3

With exception of the time, each of the values is the average of the individual values of the 4x frames collected during 1 sec.

Contacts

Computational Neurosciences and Cognitive Robotics Group at the Nottingham Trent University.

Pedro Machado pedro.baptistamachado@ntu.ac.uk

Martin McGinnity martin.mcginnity@ntu.ac.uk

RH: steps for modified calibration & visualization

  • Connect BioTacSP & Cheetah

  • roscore to enable rosnodes

  • rosrun biotac_sp_ros biotac_sp_ros_single to convert SPI data to rostopics

  • rosrun biotac_sp_ros BioTacSP_calibrate.py which waits for "calibrate" signal to compute DC offsets

  • use rostopic pub -1 /trigger_biotac_sp_calib std_msgs/String "calibrate" to trigger caibration. The calibrated data are published in "/biotac_sp_pub_calib"

  • In slayer conda environment, you can run:

    • rosrun biotac_sp_ros BioTacSP_viz.py, which displays the data in a pop-up window
    • rosrun biotac_sp_ros BioTacSP_viz_realtime.py to see a real-time plot for pdc data. Currently limited to 1000 timesteps and one plot.
    • rosrun biotac_sp_ros BioTacSP_viz_realtime_grid.py TODO multiple plots for pac, pdc, ele, temperature + moving time window

  • Tips for setting up BioTac Labview visualizer on Windows,

    • Use NI Package Manager to check the versions installed on computer. Don't just delete the files in folders
    • Install LabView 2010 (32-bit), not 64-bit. The bit version depends on the computer that built the application (which is BioTac side), not the one that runs the application/program (which is your computer).
    • Currently available software on SynTouch's website is only for BioTac (19 electrode), not BioTacSP (24 electrodes)