Ingest from fctl

Many times you will need to upload offline data for one of your robots that is indexed alongside all of your existing robot data. For example, you may have ROS bags that are collected post mission on a hard drive that are uploaded once your robot is back home.

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Prerequisite

First make sure you are setup with fctl. Instructions for installation are available in this guide.

Upload files

To upload a file for a specific device:

fctl upload alpha.003 --stream bag.upload --file /home/ubuntu/bags/2020-05-22.bag --type file --tags 'mission:autowalk;sw_version:0.8.1' --timestamp 2020-05-22T12:05:10

This will upload the file /home/ubuntu/bags/2020-05-22.bag indexed to the device alpha.003 on the stream bag.upload. The file is uploaded with type=file which means you will see the file browsing widget and be able to download that file. Additionally, you can include tags on the datapoint, in this case we include the mission and sw_version. Tags that are set on alpha.003 will automatically be applied. The last piece here is the timestamp 2020-05-22T12:05:10. This is in RFC3339 format (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss) and is UTC.

Watch a directory

fctl upload also lets you watch a directory:

fctl upload alpha.003 --stream bag.upload --directory /home/ubuntu/bags/ --type file --tags 'mission:autowalk;sw_version:0.8.1'

Similar to the upload file example above, we use the upload command and specify the stream, tags, and type parameters. The main difference here is the --directory parameter. When this parameter is specified fctl upload will begin watching that directory for new files. When a new file is created in that directory it will upload with the given parameters and use the current timestamp.

Upload remote file references

In some cases, you may wish to reference remote assets stored in your own private cloud or even on the public internet. fctl upload allows you to ingest datapoints that are time aligned the rest of the data you send to Formant:

fctl upload alpha.003 --stream bag.upload --file https://storage.googleapis.com/cartographer-public-data/bags/toru/hallway_localization.bag --type file --tags 'mission:autowalk;sw_version:0.8.1' --timestamp 2020-05-22T12:05:10