TR-Autonomy-1

First Training Module for TR Autonomy Recruits

Task Overview

This module works with publishers and subscribers. A quick summary is that publishers can publish data to a topic (such as /measuredpos), and subscribers will receive that data.
In this module, you will have available to you a topic that publishes the measured position and velocity of a target moving around a circle in 1.5 second intervals. Your task is to subscribe to the published data (part 1) and publish to your custom topic your predictions of where the data will be (part 2).

The below video shows what the tracker output should look like. The target is represented by // and our estimate is represented by \\. When they coincide, they are represented by ╳╳

refsol-2023-08-24_15.38.36.mp4

Getting Started

Next you have to build the packages. 2 tools we use for building packages are rosdep and colcon. To install them into your system, start by running these commands:

# install colcon
sudo apt install python3-colcon-common-extensions
# install rosdep
apt-get install python3-rosdep
# initialize rosdep (only need to do this once)
sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

Workspaces are directories for ROS2 packages. Each training assignment that we clone is going to be its own workspace. Starting by cloning the github repository in whichever directory you desire.

git clone YOUR_REPOSITORY_URL

Source the root setup file from your ros installation (typically in /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash) in the shell you are building in. Then at the root of this workspace, first isntall any necessary dependencies using rosdep, then run colcon build. This generates an overlay with your packages. You then have to open a new terminal, navigate to your workspace directory, and source install/setup.bash to source your overlay. These set of commands commands are run every time you setup a new package. Reference

cd TR-Autonomy-1/
source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash
rosdep install -i --from-path src --rosdistro humble -y
colcon build
# OPEN_NEW_TERMINAL AND NAVIGATE TO YOUR CLONED REPOSITORY
source install/setup.bash

If rosdep install gives you the error: "When using Python >= 3.11, PEP 668 compliance requires you to allow pip to install alongside externally managed packages using the 'break-system-packages' option." It simply means that users must allow pip to install packages system-wide to avoid system-breaking changes. You can either fix this by using a virtual environment or by setting the environment variable PIP_BREAK_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=1 before running commands.

Finally, you can run the spinnything node which makes the target visualization, publishes the tracking data, and listens for the predicted position.

ros2 run spinnything spinnything

The output should look like the following. Notice the predicted position is not moving,

nosub-2023-08-24_15.37.21.mp4

Whenever you make file changes, all you have to do is run colcon build and run the package again:

Architecture

The point of this assignment is to get used to writing ROS2 publishers and subscribers in a non-trivial example.

When running spinnything, there is a spinnything node:

~/Documents/TR-CV-1$ ros2 node list
/spinnything

We can also see what topics there are:

~/Documents/TR-CV-1$ ros2 topic list
/measuredpos
/measuredvel
/parameter_events
/predictedpos
/rosout

The topics published by spinnything are /measuredpos and /measuredvel. We can check how often they are published:

~/Documents/TR-CV-1$ ros2 topic hz /measuredpos
average rate: 0.663
	min: 1.501s max: 1.517s std dev: 0.00821s window: 2

It is up to you to publish /predictedpos much faster than this:

~/Documents/TR-CV-1$ ros2 topic hz /predictedpos
average rate: 2000.087
	min: 0.000s max: 0.001s std dev: 0.00003s window: 2002

To do this, you write a node in the your_solution package

graph TD;
sol("yoursolution")
tng("spinnything")
sol == /predictedpos ==> tng;
tng == /measuredpos ==> sol;
tng == /measuredvel ==> sol;

Loading

Basically, you listen to /measuredpos and /measuredvel from spinnything. Then, using that data you make predictions to /predictedpos, which spinnything subscribes to and updates the tracker accordingly. The messages are all of type ArrayMsg = std_msgs::msg::Float64MultiArray, the 0th entry is the x coordinate, the 1st entry is the y coordinate.

In order to predict the location of the target: use the following algorithm:

$\vec{x_p} = \vec{x} + \Delta t \vec{v}$

Where $x_p$ is the predicted position vector, $x$ and $v$ are previously measured position and velocity, and $\Delta t$ is the change in time since the measurement was received by your node.

What you need to do:

Part 1 (Optional)

Create a node (the code is set up for you in spin_slow_update.cpp and spin_slow_update.h) that takes the measured position and immediately republishes it to the predicted postion. The result should look like this:

slowupdate-2023-08-24_15.37.55.mp4

Part 2 (Required)

Create a node (the code is set up for you in spin_sol.cpp and spin_sol.h) that predicts the position of the target (using the algorithm above) and publishes it more frequently than the measurements. It should use a rclcpp wall timer callback to do this. The final product should look like this:

refsol-2023-08-24_15.38.36.mp4

Before you write code setup a proper LSP

follow this guide to setup clangd. This has significantly better performance than the microsoft C/C++ intellisense extension. Doing this is highly recommended

If you cannot access that guide / the main TR-Autonomy repo please yell at your nearest autonomy lead to add you to the github : )

you will need to copy over the colcon_defaults.yaml and .clang-format files from the main TR-Autonomy repository where that guide lives

Submission Directions

Commit your completed code for Part 2 (and optionally Part 1) to this github repo, and submit it if that's possible (IDK how GH classroom works)