ALUserSession¶
NAOqi Core - Overview | API
Getting Started 1 - Activity Developer | Getting Started 2 - User Data Provider Developer
Warning
This is a WIP, API and documentation is not definitive.
For further details, see: Coming soon.
What it does¶
ALUserSession manages the state of active users, and the bindings to their data.
It is a state machine of present users with open sessions, and the one focused user who the robot is currently tracking.
ALUserSession provides centralized access to user data across multiple providers. This data is for user identification, user information, and user authentication.
The data can optionally be permanent on the robot or not.
Each data providers decides it’s own policy for what to upload to the cloud.
How it works¶
When a human is present, ALAutonomousLife‘s mind detects them via ALBasicAwareness. Then it attempts to autonomously map this perceived human to an existing user via built in rolling facial detection. If this human cannot be identified as an existing user, a new user is created in ALUserSession. If the human could not be identified because the robot could not see the face well enough, then a special anonymous user is used, and the robot will try to identify the face again 3 seconds later.
ALUserSession sends events to inform the Activity and other modules that a user focus change has occurred so they can adapt themselves as necessary.
For example, the ALDialog module loads the Focused user’s previous set of conversational variables and state into the current context, to ensure a smooth and coherent conversation that evolves individually with each user.
One could develop an Activity that considers all of the present users with open sessions, and find something in common with them, and make an interesting comment to impress them.
Coming soon¶
Only the user info get API is available now. Set will be in the next release. Until then, to set data, see the domain specific source module.
Developers will also be able to get/set data on the fly bound to their own domain of choice (e.g. “com.mycompany.mygreatgame”) using the built in source DB.
The ALPeoplePerception data source is not queryable for info. But the binding to the ALPeoplePerception ID is available, so you can query that to browse the ALPeoplePerception/People/<ID> ALMemory tree.
The API’s to make a user become (un)permanent (meaning persistent between NAOqi bootups) will be made public. Until then, all new users will be forgotten by the robot if they haven’t been seen for 10 minutes. If you would like to experiment with this functionality before 1.22.4, please contact support.