Encoder Consistency test - hip pitch joint gear ratio about robots-configuration

[pattacini]

This bug has been fixed via robotology/icub-tests#60.

We demonstrated that the approach of using IRemoteVariables is viable.
We may take this into consideration for a possible future overhaul of the icub-tests in this sense.

cc @davidetome @traversaro @gsisinna @Uboldi80

[pattacini]

Thanks @violadelbono for the thorough analysis 🎉

I can see two problems:

• it's fundamentally a mistake that the test is taking the parameters from its own ini files instead of getting them from the official robot configuration, either by reading those files straight away or making some calls to the API. We really need to stick to the principle of the single source of truth.
• we don't have to adjust Gearbox and matrixJ2M in order to get the expected results; rather, we need to fix them up in order to make them correspond to their physical meaning. The fact that the test will be successful is only a consequence of such a fix. Gearbox and matrixJ2M do have different meanings indeed although they refer to the same mechanism and do have mutual interplay.

I suggest the option 1 for all the future robots, so I don't have to change the ini files, but I would like some feedback.

We need to fix all the robots that have this problem, past and future, and if this means that we need to touch thousands of conf files, it's the only way to go (we already did this in the past).

We will discuss this further.

[violadelbono]

@pattacini @traversaro I agree with you! Right now it's a bit confusing

[traversaro]

We would need to double check the values, but it seems that several related parameters/values are indeed exposed:

• https://github.com/robotology/icub-main/blob/cf42375998f1450ecfeaa027a64d83bd84c37094/src/libraries/icubmod/embObjMotionControl/embObjMotionControl.cpp#L3163
• https://github.com/robotology/icub-main/blob/cf42375998f1450ecfeaa027a64d83bd84c37094/src/libraries/icubmod/embObjMotionControl/embObjMotionControl.cpp#L3202
• https://github.com/robotology/icub-main/blob/cf42375998f1450ecfeaa027a64d83bd84c37094/src/libraries/icubmod/embObjMotionControl/embObjMotionControl.cpp#L3209

[pattacini]

Talking w/ @traversaro, it came out that we could exploit http://www.yarp.it/git-master/classyarp_1_1dev_1_1IRemoteVariables.html to access robot variables.

This way, the test wouldn't have to load the parameters from its own conf files and the single source of truth would be guaranteed.

Example of usage.