Autonomous Abilities

Overview | State machine management | Autonomous Abilities | Extractors management

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What are Autonomous Abilities

Autonomous Abilities exist to keep the robot alive at all times.

For example, they may cause the robot to move, or may animate his LEDs.

List of Autonomous Abilities

Autonomous Ability	Description	For further details see ...
AutonomousBlinking	Enables the robot to make its eye LEDs blink when it sees someone and when it is interacting.	ALAutonomousBlinking
BackgroundMovement	Defines which slight movements the robot does autonomously when its limbs are not moving.	ALBackgroundMovement
BasicAwareness	Allows the robot to react to the environment to establish and keep eye contact with people.	ALBasicAwareness
ListeningMovement	Enables some slight movements showing that the robot is listening.	ALListeningMovement
SpeakingMovement	Enables to start autonomously movements during the speech of the robot.	ALSpeakingMovement

How it works

Autonomous Life states modify Autonomous Abilities configurations

Each time ALAutonomousLife enters into a new State or reinforce the current one (when an Activity starts or stops), the Autonomous abilities are set into a specific configuration.

Autonomous Abilities configurations are set depending on Autonomous Life states, as shown in the following table:

	Autonomous Life state
	Disabled	Solitary	Interactive
AutonomousBlinking	Disabled	Disabled	Enabled
BackgroundMovement	Disabled	Enabled	Enabled
BasicAwareness	Disabled	Enabled	Enabled
		Types of stimulus Sound, Movement, People and Touch	Types of stimulus Sound, Movement, People and Touch
		Engagement Mode Unengaged	Engagement Mode FullyEngaged
		Tracking Mode Pepper: BodyRotation Nao: Head	Tracking Mode Pepper: BodyRotation Nao: Head
ListeningMovement	Disabled	Enabled	Enabled
SpeakingMovement	Enabled	Enabled	Enabled
	Mode contextual	Mode contextual	Mode contextual

Priority between the Autonomous Abilities

Each Autonomous Ability has an enabled and a running boolean value:

• enabled value means the Autonomous Ability has right to move the robot.
• running value means the Autonomous Ability is currently running.

There is some priority between the Autonomous Abilities, that causes constraints in the running boolean values:

• BackgroundMovement will not be running when ListeningMovement or SpeakingMovement is running.
• ListeningMovement will not be running when SpeakingMovement is running.
• SpeakingMovement has the highest autonomous ability priority.

Note

AutonomousBlinking and BasicAwareness don’t deal with the priorities between the autonomous abilities because they can run in parallel.

Customizing Autonomous Abilities

In some cases, you may want to disable all or part of the Autonomous Abilities or at least customize the configuration of the underlying feature.

Note

Best practice: do not disable unduly

If you have the need to sometimes stop an Autonomous Ability, you should still keep it running as much as possible, or provide equivalent customized functionality in your Activity in order to keep your robot continuously alive.

How to enable/disable Autonomous Ability

Methods:

• ALAutonomousLifeProxy::setAutonomousAbilityEnabled
• ALAutonomousLifeProxy::getAutonomousAbilityEnabled
• ALAutonomousLifeProxy::getAutonomousAbilitiesStatus

Example in python

alautonomouslife_setautonomousabilityenabled.py

#! /usr/bin/env python
# -*- encoding: UTF-8 -*-

"""Example: Use setAutonomousAbilityEnabled Method"""

import qi
import argparse
import sys


def main(session):
    """
    This example uses the setAutonomousAbilityEnabled method.
    """
    # Get the service ALAutonomousLife.

    life_service = session.service("ALAutonomousLife")
    life_service.setAutonomousAbilityEnabled("BasicAwareness", True)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
    parser.add_argument("--ip", type=str, default="127.0.0.1",
                        help="Robot IP address. On robot or Local Naoqi: use '127.0.0.1'.")
    parser.add_argument("--port", type=int, default=9559,
                        help="Naoqi port number")

    args = parser.parse_args()
    session = qi.Session()
    try:
        session.connect("tcp://" + args.ip + ":" + str(args.port))
    except RuntimeError:
        print ("Can't connect to Naoqi at ip \"" + args.ip + "\" on port " + str(args.port) +".\n"
               "Please check your script arguments. Run with -h option for help.")
        sys.exit(1)
    main(session)

How to modify Autonomous Ability parameters

To customize Autonomous Ability parameters, use the API of the corresponding service, see:

• ALAutonomousBlinking API
• ALBackgroundMovement API
• ALBasicAwareness API
• ALListeningMovement API
• ALSpeakingMovement API