Project Oval

Project On-campus Vehicle Autonomous Launch (OVAL) is a project ran with the intentions of desigining an autonomous vehicle that is capable of traveling throughout NC State's campus. With this framework, it can provide research opportunities for students to test on the vehicle as it travels throughout the campus. In addition, it provides the opportunity for the University to adopt it for package delivery, security, plant monitor, or any other autonomous application needed around campus.

Startup requires setting up the ROS2 environment on the on board computer, setting up the GUI on a separate computer, and setting up the EC2 AWS web server on a separate computer or the same one as the GUI

Startup Sequence For On Board Computer (Jetson)

List of all the nodes needed:

Joy Node
Swift GNSS Node
Zed Node
XBox Controller Node
Motor Actuation Node
RTK Node
Pure Pursuit Node
Server Node
Capture Images Node

Below are the instructions for starting each node

Joy Node

This node is used to output the joystick outputs from the XBox controller.

ros2 run joy joy_node --ros-args -p autorepeat_rate:=0.0

Zed Node

This node is used to output the Zed topics which can be found here

ros2 launch zed_wrapper zed_camera.launch.py camera_model:=zed2i

Swift GNSS Node

This node is used to output the Swift GNSS topics. Specifically it outputs /fixgps which contains velocity of the vehicle, position, and yaw.

ros2 launch swiftnav_ros2_driver start.py

XBOX Controller Node

This node subscribes to the Joy Node messages to output the correct actions depending on what buttons are pushed and movements in the joystick.

python node_xbox_controller.py

Motor Actuation Node

This node subscribes to the XBox Controller Node to receive manual throttle and steering and if a button is pushed to switch modes. If the mode is switched, it switches to pure pursuit mode where it subscribes to its throttle and steering calculated from the RTK Node.

python node_motor_act.py

Pure Pursuit Node

This node subscribes to the RTK Node to know its latitude, longitude, yaw, and speed. It also subscribes to the Server Node to receive the waypoints that it must travel to. With this information, it calculates from its current position to the next waypoint, what steering is needed. It also maintains a constant speed by adjusting the throttle (ie increase throttle if going up hill and decrease throttle if going down hill)

python node_pure_pursuit.py

Server Node

This node receives waypoints from the server and publishes them to the Pure Pursuit Node. It also subscribes to the RTK Node to receive its current position to then send that back over the server.

python node_server.py

RTK Node

This node subscribes to the Swift GNSS Node to receive the current position, yaw, and speed.

python node_rtk.py

Camera Node

This node is only needed if you need photos to be recorded while driving around. It subscribes to the Zed Node to receive images from the camera and captures them and saves them to a file to help with training.

python node_capture_images.py

Startup Sequence For GUI and Web Server

Activate the Kivy Virtual Environment to run the GUI
Instructions for setting up kivy virtual environment

GUI

Change to the GUI directory.

python main.py

EC2 AWS Webserver

Login to the webserver account
Begin the instance of the server
The server should start, if not follow the below commands

cd code

python Server.py

Common Issues

CAN Issues

If node_motor_act.py outputs the following exception:

failed to transmit [Errno 105] No buffer space available

Solution:

sudo modprobe can_raw
sudo modprobe can
sudo modprobe mttcan
sudo ip link set can0 up type can bitrate 250000
sudo ip link set up can0
sudo busybox devmem 0x0c303018 w 0x458
sudo busybox devmem 0x0c303010 w 0x400

ncsu-yoon-lab/project-oval