ForceShoesPlugin

This plugin integrates the force sensors of the Xsens force shoes into mc_rtc.

It depends on:

• mc_rtc

Installation

After installing the dependencies,

git clone [email protected]:Hugo-L3174/mc_force_shoe_plugin.git
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
make -j8
sudo make install

Running instructions

Run using your mc_rtc interface of choice, add ForceShoesPlugin to the Plugins configuration entry or enable the autoload option. By default the set baudrate is 921k6 and the port is "/dev/ttyUSB0" since this is intended to be used on a linux machine but this can be changed in the ForceShoePlugin.in.yaml configuration file.

The plugin starts the force shoes and looks for an existing calibration file in '/tmp/force-shoe-calib.yaml' (see the configuration file). If it exists it loads this calibration reads the force data, otherwise it calibrates the shoes on 100 iterations.

This means that if you do not have a calibration file when starting you must wait before putting on the shoes ! Calibration is fast but do not start with shoes already on.

Use in a controller

The plugin creates datastore calls that can be used in any controller to read the force value of the 4 force sensors, such as:

  sva::ForceVecd LFShoe_ = datastore().call<sva::ForceVecd>("ForceShoePlugin::GetLFForce");
  sva::ForceVecd LBShoe_ = datastore().call<sva::ForceVecd>("ForceShoePlugin::GetLBForce");
  sva::ForceVecd RFShoe_ = datastore().call<sva::ForceVecd>("ForceShoePlugin::GetRFForce");
  sva::ForceVecd RBShoe_ = datastore().call<sva::ForceVecd>("ForceShoePlugin::GetRBForce");

LF, LB, RF, RB being the left front, left back, right front and right back sensors on the shoes.

GUI elements are also created to recalibrate at runtime if needed.

Combine with replay

The plugin also handles replay of the datastore entries if the log-to-datastore.in.yaml file of your replay configuration has the following entries:

ForceShoes_LBShoeMeasure: ReplayPlugin::LBForce
ForceShoes_LFShoeMeasure: ReplayPlugin::LFForce
ForceShoes_RBShoeMeasure: ReplayPlugin::RBForce
ForceShoes_RFShoeMeasure: ReplayPlugin::RFForce

With the left keys being the corresponding log entries.

In this case you must add either

liveMode: false

to this plugin's configuration, or

ForceShoes:
    liveMode: false

to your controller's configuration.