Part 5: Collecting Data

In this part of the tutorial, you will:

Create an action on the tablet to capture data from the services we wrote.
Record a mission using those actions around your environment.
Play back the mission to autonomously capture data to the recorded locations.
Download the data from the robot.
Configure the robot to automatically upload its data to the cloud.

To collect data we will create an Autowalk mission with Spot.

Creating Actions

For our data collection, we want to capture from both sources. We will create a new action “web_cam_battery” that captures both. To do that, navigate to Settings -> Actions from the hamburger menu.

Settings/Actions

Then, click Create New Action, which brings up the menu shown below to choose a template.

Action Template

Select the Empty Inspection template and click CREATE. The following window pops up, where you can update the action name to “web_cam_battery”, select Daq option. Then, select Data Acquisition Battery - Battery as the Data Acquisition Plugin and add another Data Acquisition Plugin for Data Acquisition - Basic Position Data. Finally, click + Add Images and then and select Web Cam - Video0:

New action video selection

Testing the action

You may now drive the robot around and trigger the new action. This will cause it to capture both the web cam image and the battery data. This data can be downloaded from the “Download Data” in the hamburger menu, where you will be able to see the images captured directly on the tablet.

Mission Recording

Follow these steps to record a mission with the new captures:

First select Autowalk from the drop-down menu in the top-left corner of the app, and then select Record.
Enter mission name.
Stand the robot up and move it near a fiducial, if necessary. The app displays those two warnings till both are satisfied. The robot automatically detects fiducials in the robot cameras field of view.
Start recording.
Move robot to location where to capture data.
Then, click the Red Plus button, select INSPECTIONS and choose web_cam_battery action.
In the next screen, align the camera view with the arrows on the screen if necessary, and then click Configure.
In the next screen, click Create to create action.
Repeat steps 5-8 as desired.
When done recording the mission, click Finish Recording to save mission.

Mission playback

Next, follow these steps to play back the mission recorded in the section above.

First select Autowalk from the drop-down menu in the top-left corner of the app, and then select Playback.
Select DAQ_Tutorial_Mission mission and click Continue, Continue and Play Now in the next screens and then press the green Play button in the final screen.
Move the robot near the fiducial at the beginning of the mission and click Initialize.
When the mission completes, download the captured data by clicking “Sit and View Data”.

Configure the robot to automatically upload its data to the cloud.

The Post Docking Callbacks example contains scripts to enable users to upload files saved during a data acquisition mission to various endpoints, with the target use case having the callback run when Spot docks at the end of an Autowalk mission. Please follow instructions in that example to set up a callback to upload the captured data to AWS when the robot docks.

Head over to Part 6: Processing Collected Data >>

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