New editor for task specifications
We have created a graphical editor for task specifications (called “action recipes” in the RoboEarth project). The manual creation of these specifications can be tedious task and requires rather deep knowledge of the OWL language. It is also prone to errors like incorrect transition specifications or wrong action arguments. The graphical editor is intended to speed up the creation and update of action recipes. It further serves as compact visualization of an action recipe and as supervision interface during task execution.
The following image gives an overview of its interface. In the top row, there are three groups of buttons for loading recipes from RoboEarth, for saving them back, and for starting the execution on the UNR Platform. The bottom left area visualizes the task specification, i.e. the single actions, their respective properties, and the transitions between them (whose type is visualized by different colors – green for 'OK', red for 'ERROR'). The two groups of form elements on the right-hand side describe properties of the recipe as a whole. The base IRI defines the name space of the OWL elements that are part of the recipe; the default value can be kept here. The other forms are described below.
Refactoring of visualization code
The visualization infrastructure in KnowRob had grown a lot over the past years and had partly become somewhat messy, so some refactoring was needed. In rev. 958, several changes have been merged back into trunk. If you are just using the packages mod_vis and knowrob_common, no changes should be necessary. If you direclty use the classes in these packages, you will likely need to update your name spaces and possibly the locations of .jar file references. A summary of the main changes:
- Created a hierarchy of classes for OWL elements (classes, instances,…) and methods for reading/writing them from/to Prolog and OWL files
- Moved generic functionality into knowrob_common (Prolog interface, common queries, resource retriever)
- New PlanVisAppletFsm for visualizing state-machine like action specifications; the old applet is still available and can be used for legacy plan specifications
- Added several other applets for editing OWL information to mod_vis * Tidied up old namespaces and class names (e.g. fipm, StandaloneKitchenVisApplet) For a detailed summary, please have a look at the commits in the vis-refactoring branch.