Stuck on Simulating Controller and Joystick
daylanc opened this issue · 4 comments
Hello,
I am on the simulation step where we connect an Xbox controller to control the simulated drone. How exactly do I connect a wireless Xbox 360 controller or Xbox One controller to the simulation? Looking online I need a wired Xbox 360 controller or a wireless gaming receiver adapter to get it connected to ubuntu. Is there any other ways to connect a wireless Xbox 360 or Xbox One controller to the simulation?
Also, following issue #105 PX4_Controller, Image_Pub, and Caffe_Ros are highlighted red in the docker container. I was trying to follow the symbolic links, but couldn't figure out what was wrong. I was trying to edit line 179 of this code: https://github.com/NVIDIA-AI-IOT/redtail/blob/master/tools/simulation/docker/Dockerfile.kinetic#L179 but didn't seem like my changes made any difference. After editing the dockerfile do we need to rebuild the redtail image? Or can we just open a new container? Maybe I'm having an issue with the pointing paths from the host directory to the container..
Thanks.
As for the controller: we use NVIDIA Shield controller which connects to a computer via Bluetooth. We also tried wired version of XBox controller and it worked fine (remember to provide proper joy_type when running px4_controller node). I'm not familiar with wireless XBox controller so if it does not have USB connector then you probably need to buy adapter, as you mentioned.
As for the build: redtail Docker image does not have redtail source code. This is done intentionally as containers should be stateless, if possible. redtail source code directory is mapped into the container by providing parameters to the run_redtail_docker.sh script, which by default are /data/ and /data/ which means /data/ directory on the host is mapped into /data/ directory in the container). Once the container is created and running, you can run build_redtail.sh script from the container, optionally providing path to redtail sources (default is /data/src/redtail). You don't need to edit anything, just make sure your paths are consistent when running the scripts.
@Alexey-Kamenev
Will the px_contoller node work if the controller isn’t paired correctly with the computer? I’m trying to figure out if it’s a problem with the container not having the source codes or if it’s a problem with the Xbox wireless controller not pairing properly with the computer.
On another note: I'm opening up different windows for Gazebo, Mavros, and the Controller and connecting it to the created Redtail-sim container using sudo ./run_redtail_docker.sh Once I have each new terminal window connected to the Redtail-sim, what are the steps to make sure they are all working together? Do I have to create symlinks to the host /redtail folder? Do I have to re-source each window with source devel/setup.bash?
And finally: I don't see anything in the simulation wiki to run_px4_docker.sh in the "Docker" section of the wiki. I see it in the "build from source" section, but I'm not too clear about when I should run the run_ps4_docker.sh script. Does sudo ./run_px4_docker.sh replace the sudo ./run_redtail_docker.sh script for the controller node? For instance, setting up the "controller terminal":
- Open new terminal
cd ~/redtail/tools/simulationsudo ./run_px4_docker.sh- Run controller and joystick node as stated in the simulation
@Alexey-Kamenev
Solved this issue: My problem was that I wasn't removing the redtail-sim docker container correctly. I was checking for open containers using sudo docker ps and stopping them using sudo docker stop redtail-sim after checking for open containers again, it didn't show the redtail-sim container, so I assumed I closed it. The correct way to check is with: sudo docker ps -a
As for the symlinks problem, once the redtail-sim container was closed correctly, I could start up a new container using sudo ./run_redtail_docker.sh redtail-sim ~/redtail/ ~/redtail/ to map the /home/redtail/ folder in the host to the /home/redtail/ folder in the container. Once inside the container, I ran ./build_redtail.sh /home/redtail/ and it successfully built all packages. checking the /ws/src/ folder, I verified all packages were built because they turned cyan colored.
Trying the controller node worked and I can control the quad in Gazebo. For a follow-on question, what are the next steps for the simulation? Should I test the DNN and train/test my own trail?
Thank you for all the help.
Glad you were able to resolve the issues! Yes, the next steps would be trying our pre-trained model on your trail images/videos and see how it performs. I would expect pre-trained DNN to perform reasonably well if your trails are not very different from ours. But the very first step should be testing on a single test image to make sure all components work fine (use image_pub and one of our test images).