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Kalman

The software for AGH Space System's planetary rover

Prerequisites

  • All Python packages listed in the requirements.txt files in the directories of some Colcon packages.
  • All APT packages listed in the apt_packages.txt files in the directories of some Colcon packages.

Getting Started

To make development quicker, the launch process of the development setup has been split into two separate launch files. One of them, suffixed _sim_base, launches the simulation environment and RViz. The other one, suffixed _sim_stack, launches the rest of the software stack, including localization, mapping, and navigation capabilities:

ros2 launch kalman_bringup urc_autonomy_sim_base.launch.py
# Before running the next command, make sure that the simulation is started and sensor messages are being published.
ros2 launch kalman_bringup urc_autonomy_sim_stack.launch.py

Note

The commands shown above will launch the Unity simulation environment which requires additional installation. Please follow the instructions here in order to set up Unity.

In order to run on a physical rover, just one launch file is needed:

ros2 launch kalman_bringup urc_autonomy_rover.launch.py

To launch the ground station, use the following command on a separate machine:

ros2 launch kalman_bringup urc_autonomy_gs.launch.py

For certain features to work, the ground station should be connected to the same network as the rover and/or have our custom radio communication hardware connected to it.

Multiple other launch files are available in the kalman_bringup package, including the ones for other competitions and development purposes.

Packages

Kalman's software stack is composed of multiple packages that are meant to be built and run together:

  • kalman_arm_* - packages that power Kalman's 6DoF arm
  • kalman_aruco - ArUco tags detection using aruco_opencv
  • kalman_bringup - launch files for the rover and the ground station
  • kalman_clouds - point cloud generation and filtering
  • kalman_description - Xacro / URDF descriptions + models for the rover
  • kalman_hardware - drivers, tools and launch scripts for the physical hardware onboard; Only to be run separately from the simulation on a physical robot.
  • kalman_interfaces - ROS 2 messages, services and actions used by the other kalman_ packages
  • kalman_master - drivers for our custom Master device
  • kalman_nav2 - configuration and launch files for Nav2 and related modules; Includes a custom path follower.
  • kalman_robot - a metapackage that depends on all other kalman_ packages
  • kalman_slam - configuration files for robot_localization and RTAB-Map
  • kalman_supervisor - Manages autonomous navigation missions.
  • kalman_wheels - a node that converts Twist messages on /cmd_vel and similar topics to the actual wheel state; Also includes safeguards that can limit the acceleration and velocity or stop the rover to adjust wheel rotation.
  • kalman_yolo - PRIVATE models and configs for yolo_ros

Sub-projects

  • joy_linux - joystick_srivers/joy_linux with our modifications and improvements
  • point_cloud_utils - utilities for working with point clouds; Includes ROS wrappers around PCL filters and an obstacle detection node.
  • service_based_nav2_controller - a FollowPath controller plugin for Nav2 that uses a service to compute velocity commands
  • unity_sim - a Unity-based simulation environment that can seamlessly replace the physical hardware of AGH Space Systems' robots
  • yolo_ros - YOLO-based object detector; Supports composition and lifecycle management.

Launch Hierarchy

Launch files are organized in a hierarchical manner. The kalman_bringup package contains main launch files that are meant to be the only ones used via ros2 launch. kalman_bringup includes many other launch files from other kalman_ packages, which in turn may include even more launch files from other packages:

Data Flow

All kalman_ packages are designed to work together and exchange data in a complex manner. The following diagram shows a high-level overview of the data flow between top-level modules:

As mentioned in Launch Hierarchy, top-level modules may include other modules that are not shown in the diagram. Each module contains a set of nodes that actually perform the data processing and exchange.

Guidelines

  • When committing new code, please follow the Conventional Commits specification.
  • The scripts directory should only contain scripts that are meant to be installed as ROS executables.
  • The tools directory should only contain developer utilities and not ROS-related code.
  • Whenever possible, design your C++ nodes as components. See this tutorial for more information.
  • If a dependency is not available in rosdep, please add it to the apt_packages.txt or requirements.txt file created next to package.xml. Always prefer rosdep over those files.

Troubleshooting

Out of Memory

kalman_robot builds some third-party C++ dependencies from source. By default Colcon allocates jobs without rescheduling them when memory usage approaches maximum. In turn your system may run out of memory while a build is running. To avoid this, create a swap file on your system:

sudo fallocate -l 16G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

After the build is done, you can remove the swap file:

sudo swapoff /swapfile
sudo rm /swapfile

Subsequent incremental builds should not need that much memory.