This week we have continued working on understanding the rtabmap package we’re using, looking at the data it provides on its topics with rviz. Cameras have still not yet arrived (as was mentioned last week they were lost in shipping and had to be reordered) so tasks such as configuring the cameras and working on object detection has to be postponed for now, and we’re using the bags that came with the rtabmap package while we don’t have our own sensor data. Meanwhile with the cameras we have tried calibrating cameras we have at hand, not ones usable for stereo camera, to work with ROS though we’ve had some trouble with this so far because they’re outdated. Now that we’re a bit more familiar with ROS, we’ve started developing the nodes we’ll be needing, with primary focus right now on the node for controlling the car.

In addition to this we’ve been doing work on the car. There were some trouble when we tried to get the DC motors to run, we tried to integrate another 9V battery to make way for more components that we are going to use on our system. We are working on making sure that when we get our camera we can just plug it into our raspberry without having to worry about power management.  

To better understand the data we where going to deal with we made our own simple visualisation in unity from some test samples we saved. Even tough ROS has rviz for built in GUI we wanted to have a hands on approach to understand the data.