I'm programming a Pepper app with Choregraphe to make a conversation. This conversations have some different sorted states:
Hello (start of conversation)
ask for information
Specify the information
Goodbye (end of the conversation)
To start a conversation, people have to get close to the robot and the robot has to detect a face.
The problem is that if I am in middle of the conversation and the robot detect another face, it starts the conversation at the beginning. So I need to disable the event temporally, while the robot is in a conversation. Is there a way to do it?
These are the events output of Choregraphe:
At your place, I would program it as a finite state machine: you decide your detection and the way to switch from one state to another, in a simple way. Each processing of one state is stopped when you change state.
You can download a simple state machine here: http://protolab.aldebaran.com/public/the_3_templates.zip
you cannot disable them on that format, but if you use the "subscribe to event" box, there are start/stop inputs that you can use to enable/disable the box, i.e. subscribe/unsubscribe to the events.
At the end I visit this part of documentation and looked at Engagement Modes.
To allow a wider range of behaviors, ALBasicAwareness provides 3 engagement modes that specify how “focused” the robot is on the engaged person.
“Unengaged”: (Default mode) when the robot is engaged with a user, it can be distracted by any stimulus, and engage with another person.
“FullyEngaged”: as soon as the robot is engaged with a person, it stops listening to stimuli and stays engaged with the same person. If it loses the engaged person, it will listen to stimuli again and may engage with a different person.
“SemiEngaged”: when the robot is engaged with a person, it keeps listening to the stimuli, and if it gets a stimulus, it will look in its direction, but it will always go back to the person it is engaged with. If it loses the person, it will listen to stimuli again and may engage with a different person.
I have used FullyEngaged and the robot only focuses on the first person that enter the robot Zone 1.
This is done like this:
basic_awareness = ALProxy("ALBasicAwareness", ip_robot, port_robot)
basic_awareness.setEngagementMode("FullyEngaged")
basic_awareness.startAwareness()
Related
Hey I'm a new Dialog Flow user, I love the application, but there is an issue I can't solve. My bot assistent actually is very simple is made by a simple menu with numbers, each number has a intent:
(1) How our business works
(2) Services
(3) Our benefits
(4) Project request
(5) Financial
(6) Meeting and appointments
(7) Contact
(8) Questions and technical support
Default fallback intent
Default welcome intent
Every numbers has a away to come back to the main menu, and a away to ask for a real assistent.
For exemple: Meeting and appointments (6)
We do weekly video call alignments, as well as you can follow the progress of the project on Trello. If you want to schedule a meeting time, send an email to gorilafreela#gmail.com, inform when, reasons, we use the https://meet.google.com platform for meetings. Type [X] to return to the menu. Enter [A] to request a real answer.
The problem is when the user decide to tap 'A' for request a real assistent. This should end the flow and stop doing a loop. I followed the official Google Dialog flow documentation and to finish the flow they suggested:
1 - Add event: actions_intent_CANCEL
2 - Set this intent as end of conversation
But even doing this steps, the conversation doesn't stop there. When someone call the real assistent dialog flow answer: What can I help ?, then the user ask his question, however it always go to fallback and the conversation does not finish there. I haven't integrated nodejs with dialogflow yet, but I think it isn't necessary to force a quit conversation. What can I do?
I'm making a Pepper app with Choregraphe and I have a doubt:
Pepper has to maintain a conversation with a human user and the problem is that if the user "disappears", the app is in middle of an state, and if it doesn't get any interaction, it should got to the first state (return to the start of the program). The idea was to use a timeout of no response (like the timeout between machines). Is there a way to do this with Choregraphe?
PD: The project is big and there are a lot of boxes, so add a timeout box and link it to all boxes can be messy.
PD: I have been looking to make a trigger condition, but in the condition it should detect tablet interactions like touch or that user talk to the robot.
A good way is to put all the "lot of boxes" into a parent-box (new box/diagram box).
Thus when you time out, you just stop the parent box, and all the inner box will be stopped automatically.
I'm trying to implement this pattern on a "smart building" system design (using STL library). Various "sensors" placed in rooms, floors etc, dispatch signals that are handled by "controllers" (also placed in different rooms, floors etc.). The problem I'm facing is that the controller's subscription to an event isn't just event based, it is also location based.
For example, controller A can subscribe to a fire signal from room #1 in floor #4 and to a motion signal in floor #5. A floor-based subscription means that controller A will get an motion event about every room in the floor he's subscribed to (assuming the appropriate sensor is placed there). There's also a building-wide subscription for that matter.
The topology of the system is read from a configuration file at start up, so I don't want to map the whole building, just the relevant places that contain sensors and controllers.
What I've managed to think of :
Option 1: MonitoredArea class that contains the name of the area (Building1, Floor 2, Room 3) and a vector where the vector's index is an enumerated event type each member of the vector contains a list of controllers that are subscribed to this event. The class will also contain a pointer to a parent MonitoredArea, in the case it is a room in a floor, or a floor in a building.
A Sensor class will dispatch an Event to a center hub along with the sensor's name. The hub will run it through his sensor-name-to-location map, acquire the matching MonitoredArea and will alert all the controllers in the vector.
Cons:
Coupling of the location to the controller
Events are enumerated and are hard coded in the MonitoredArea class, adding future events is difficult.
Option 2:
Keeping all the subscriptions in the Controller class.
Cons:
Very inefficient. Every event will make the control center to iterate through all the controller and find out which are subscribed to this particular event.
Option 3:
Event based functionality. Event class (ie. FireEvent) will contain all the locations it can happen in (according to the sensor's setup) and for every location, a list of the controllers that are subscribed to it.
Cons:
A map of maps
Strong data duplication
No way to alert floor-based subscriptions about events in the various rooms.
As you can see, I'm not happy with any of the mentioned solutions. I'm sure I've reached the over-thinking stage and would be happy for a feedback or alternative suggestions as to how I approach this. Thanks.
There is design pattern (sort of speak) used a lot in game development called "Message Bus". And it is sometimes used to replace event based operations.
"A message bus is a connection between one or more senders and/or receivers. Think of it like a connection between computers in a bus topology: Every node can send a message by passing it to the bus, and all connected nodes will receive that message. If the node is processed and if a reply is sent is completely up to each receiver itself.
Having modules connected to a message bus gives us some advantages:
Every module is isolated, it does not need to know of any others.
Every module can react to any message that’s being sent to the bus; that means you get extra flexibility for free, without increasing dependencies at all.
It’s much easier to follow the YAGNI workflow: For example you’re going to add weapons. At first you implement the physics, then you add visuals in the renderer, and then playing sounds. All of those features can be implemented independently at any time, without interrupting each other.
You save yourself from thinking a lot about how to connect certain modules to each other. Sometimes it takes a huge amount of time, including drawing diagrams/dependency graphs."
Sources:
http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/event-queue.html
http://www.optank.org/2013/04/02/game-development-design-3-message-bus/
I'm currently trying to write (as a part of "simple multiplayer game as an example of real time client-server application" assignment) multiplayer game server for simple fast-paced game for few players (less than 20 i think). I'm using TCP sockets for packets that require guaranteed delivery (ie.: chat messages, login and logout requests, ping packets, etc) and UDP for everything that does not necessarily need to be delivered since only the last packet that got through is important (ie.: user input, game world and objects updates, etc).
I should mention here, how my game world looks like. Every object server side has its id, role and owner members. Id is basically identifier for clients so, once I send them object updates they know which object to update on their side. Owner is information about object owner, ie.: player which controls the actor. I use it to remove orphaned objects once player loses connection / logs out. Most objects however has this value set to Server. And finally role determines whether object is important to clients. This can be set to ServerSide (for objects that do not need to be replicated to clients as they are only used in server side game state calculation), RelevantToOwner (this objects get replicated only to their owner, ie.: player private inventory does not need to be replicated to everyone), RelevantToList (object gets replicated to all players from list, ie.: i have list of players to whom the object is visible and i replicate only to them) and RelevantToAll (replicate to everyone).
When user sends login packet I check whether I have free slot and if yes, then I replicate world to him (send current world state - every object that does not have role set as ServerSide or RelevantToList - unless of course the client is on the list for that object).
Then after each iteration of server game state update loop I send exactly same thing - whole world state.
When users send logout packet I remove him from logged in clients, free slot, and remove all orphaned objects from game world (objects that had this user as owner).
Here are my questions:
Is this model suitable for real-time multiplayer game or am I doing it horribly wrong?
Is there a way to reduce amount of packets sent after the initial world replication (ie.: updating only objects which state has changed since last iteration. I've given it a thought and so far I've encountered one huge problem with this approach - if UDP packet from previous iteration is lost and state of the object haven't changed in subsequent iterations, the object will not be updated on the player side.)
How can i pack multiple object updates into one packet (I'm currently sending one object / packet which is inefficient and also probably horribly wrong.
Could someone point me to some working example (source would be nice) of simple Client/Server game so I can see how professionals do it? C++ or C would be nice but Java / C# / Python are fine too.
This depends a lot so much on what type of game you're talking about - example: Im doing roughly the same thing in a text based muck game.. My updates are simple, on arrival, send room details. On change, send messages to say people/object came/went. Done.
UDP is how most online games work just because they need to deal ith 100k+ connectios. UDP loss is often why players "warp" in game. If you're doing 20 people and you can guarentee that, then sticking with tcp will help.
do you need to send them the whole world? Is your world not made of zones/rooms. Normally you send the smaller area. It also depends on how much data on the objects within that you should send, for example. If a player has an inventory, no point sending that to all the other players unless they specifically ask for it - items worn (if a visual game then yes you need to or it draws them wrong)
Just because we have much faster connections these days doesnt mean we shouldnt take into consideration some people dont. You should try and send updates only and have the client maintain its own state, and then, when you change zones, and reload the area, you ensure sync.
To pack object changes in a packet, most likely Im guessing its location changes, eg co-ordinates, and availability, eg, person picks up item. Have an upate structure, item_id, update_type, update_values[], then you can send a chunk of updates.
Are you after text based or more mmorg type? text based I can say google tinymuck, or tinymush, tinymud, there are plenty, graphics ones? thats harder, you could lookup some of the old EQ code and WoW emulators maybe..
I'm using Qt framework which has by default non-blocking I/O to develop an application navigating through several web pages (online stores) and carrying out different actions on these pages. I'm "mapping" specific web page to a state machine which I use to navigate through this page.
This state machine has these transitions;
Connect, LogIn, Query, LogOut, Disconnect
and these states;
Start, Connecting, Connected, LoggingIn, LoggedIn, Querying, QueryDone, LoggingOut, LoggedOut, Disconnecting, Disconnected
Transitions from *ing to *ed states (Connecting->Connected), are due to LoadFinished asynchronous network events received from network object when currently requested url is loaded. Transitions from *ed to *ing states (Connected->LoggingIn) are due to events send by me.
I want to be able to send several events (commands) to this machine (like Connect, LogIn, Query("productA"), Query("productB"), LogOut, LogIn, Query("productC"), LogOut, Disconnect) at once and have it process them. I don't want to block waiting for the machine to finish processing all events I sent to it. The problem is they have to be interleaved with the above mentioned network events informing machine about the url being downloaded. Without interleaving machine can't advance its state (and process my events) because advancing from *ing to *ed occurs only after receiving network type of event.
How can I achieve my design goal?
EDIT
The state machine I'm using has its own event loop and events are not queued in it so could be missed by machine if they come when the machine is busy.
Network I/O events are not posted directly to neither the state machine nor the event queue I'm using. They are posted to my code (handler) and I have to handle them. I can forward them as I wish but please have in mind remark no. 1.
Take a look at my answer to this question where I described my current design in details. The question is if and how can I improve this design by making it
More robust
Simpler
Sounds like you want the state machine to have an event queue. Queue up the events, start processing the first one, and when that completes pull the next event off the queue and start on that. So instead of the state machine being driven by the client code directly, it's driven by the queue.
This means that any logic which involves using the result of one transition in the next one has to be in the machine. For example, if the "login complete" page tells you where to go next. If that's not possible, then the event could perhaps include a callback which the machine can call, to return whatever it needs to know.
Asking this question I already had a working design which I didn't want to write about not to skew answers in any direction :) I'm going to describe in this pseudo answer what the design I have is.
In addition to the state machine I have a queue of events. Instead of posting events directly to the machine I'm placing them in the queue. There is however problem with network events which are asynchronous and come in any moment. If the queue is not empty and a network event comes I can't place it in the queue because the machine will be stuck waiting for it before processing events already in the queue. And the machine will wait forever because this network event is waiting behind all events placed in the queue earlier.
To overcome this problem I have two types of messages; normal and priority ones. Normal ones are those send by me and priority ones are all network ones. When I get network event I don't place it in the queue but instead I send it directly to the machine. This way it can finish its current task and progress to the next state before pulling the next event from the queue of events.
It works designed this way only because there is exactly 1:1 interleave of my events and network events. Because of this when the machine is waiting for a network event it's not busy doing anything (so it's ready to accept it and does not miss it) and vice versa - when the machine waits for my task it's only waiting for my task and not another network one.
I asked this question in hope for some more simple design than what I have now.
Strictly speaking, you can't. Because you only have state "Connecting", you don't know whether you need top login afterwards. You'd have to introduce a state "ConnectingWithIntentToLogin" to represent the result of a "Connect, then Login" event from the Start state.
Naturally there will be a lot of overlap between the "Connecting" and the "ConnectingWithIntentToLogin" states. This is most easily achieved by a state machine architecture that supports state hierarchies.
--- edit ---
Reading your later reactions, it's now clear what your actual problem is.
You do need extra state, obviously, whether that's ingrained in the FSM or outside it in a separate queue. Let's follow the model you prefer, with extra events in a queue. The rick here is that you're wondering how to "interleave" those queued events vis-a-vis the realtime events. You don't - events from the queue are actively extracted when entering specific states. In your case, those would be the "*ed" states like "Connected". Only when the queue is empty would you stay in the "Connected" state.
If you don't want to block, that means you don't care about the network replies. If on the other hand the replies interest you, you have to block waiting for them. Trying to design your FSM otherwise will quickly lead to your automaton's size reaching infinity.
How about moving the state machine to a different thread, i. e. QThread. I would implent a input queue in the state machine so I could send queries non blocking and a output queue to read the results of the queries. You could even call back a slotted function in your main thread via connect(...) if a result of a query arrives, Qt is thread safe in this regard.
This way your state machine could block as long as it needs without blocking your main program.
Sounds like you just want to do a list of blocking I/O in the background.
So have a thread execute:
while( !commands.empty() )
{
command = command.pop_back();
switch( command )
{
Connect:
DoBlockingConnect();
break;
...
}
}
NotifySenderDone();