Walking System Identification

1. Load data.
2. Find the heel strike and toe-off for each foot for the run.
3. Align each foot down section in time with the first one and truncate the data for each to have equal length time series for each foot down.
4. Segment and truncate the interesting time series to match (rates, angles, etc)
5. Specify the number of time steps to retain for the control extraction.
6. Store these reduced time series in a 3D array. This can be a pandas Panel where each DataFrame in the Panel is one foot down time series. There should be one Panel for each leg.
7. Find the mean of the time series and store as the limit cycle definition.
8. Specify the inputs and outputs to the controller.
9. Form Ax=b.
10. Call linear least squares to get the gains.

Software additions

I move some signal sync functions from BicycleDataProcessor into DTK and generalized them. I plan to use it to align and truncate a series of signals from walking data.

• https://github.com/moorepants/DynamicistToolKit/commit/a7f005adef6d0ff8a0047a065eafedc21ec71d00
• https://github.com/moorepants/DynamicistToolKit/commit/ac4aa3cd16c01e392e2ba22bf4aa93eece78f111

D-Flow

Sanne is here this week from Motek to fix some issues with D-Flow and the treadmill system and to also train us in using the equipment/software. I asked her a bit about the Lua scripting in D-Flow. Sounds like they chose the language because it was easy to learn for wrapping some of their API. It is not possible to use D-Flow without manipulating the graphical programming they have implemented. In particular access to the data sources is not available so you always have to drop in the mocap or other modules for a source stream of data.

D-Flow outputs tab delimited text files when you want to extract the data from the system. When they have missing data (i.e. missing markers or force measurements) they replace them with a zero in the file. This is very problematic because the sensors can also actually output a value of zero. Sanne mentioned the unlikelihood of a sensor value to actually be 0.0000... but I don't think this is a good argument. Good software like R use NA for missing data (Pandas is bound by numpy's implementation and only has NaN, but this will be fixed). It is also important to note that NaN is different than NA and is the result of a computation than give a Not-A-Number answer. D-Flow may need a combination of NA's and NaN' because they also do internal computations (HBM for example).

Bugs

• Missing values are replaced with a zero value.

Feature Requests

• Expand the Lua API such that the user can script the whole program and avoid using anything in the GUI, in particular add access to the data sources.
• Allow the user to specify a desired text editor (vim, emacs, notepad++, etc) for the scripting environment so that editing a script automatically loads the desired text editor.
• Make the C++ API available so that we can use it directly or wrap it with our desired programming languages. This will allow us to integrate our software with D-Flow. Currently D-Flow seems to be a walled box with only an exit for text data after a simulation is run. It would be preferable to be able to access realtime data from our own software.
• It seems that D-Flow has limited use if you don't have the hardware that goes with it (i.e. treadmill, force plates, video screen, motion capture, etc). This makes the D-Flow software a prime candidate for open sourcing. If the software were open source then all the above points would not be issues, as we could extend the software and use it like we please.
• Make the feature request and bug tracker available to the public (or at least the licensed users). It would save time if we can report both of these directly to the tacking system, versus calling a support person and asking them to submit items.
• Port the software to other operating systems (in particular Linux). If the software could run in Linux then we have much better control of the security of the software via user permissions. Then we can have the system connected to a network which is connected to the internet. This would allow us to pass data out from D-Flow without having to download text files to a USB stick. There may be a way to solve this in Windows too, but I'm ignorant of that.
• Add an undo button! Right now if you accidently delete something in the graphical area you're screwed.

Cleveland Python Users Group

I went to the monthly Cleveland PUG meeting last night. Seemed like a bunch of good people. We met at Lean Dog which has a really nice office on a boat by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One guy presented his work with Jenkins which looks cool. It is an open source continuous integration system that you have full control over and can install it on your server. This seems more flexible than the Travis-CI system which is just a hosted service, but Jenkins doesn't have as nice integration with Github, you have to manually setup some hooks.

The same guy also is going to give a talk at DjangoCon soon on some interesting concepts. But I've forgotten what they were, but definitely interesting.

There was chatter about the Center for Open Science from PyOhio. Some folks met Jeffery and others at the conference.

I was surprised that everyone wasn't a complete nerd like our LUGOD meetings back in Davis. The group seemed very social which is cool.

I got to show off PyDy and SymPy for a few minutes and folks seemed to dig it.

Supposedly, next month a person will show off Kivy.