osrf/car_demo

Questions about road width and the scale of the car

Opened this issue · 7 comments

Hi,

Thanks for sharing your code. It's really an amazing work. I now have two questions about the model of car and world:

The first one is about the scale of the car. Looked at from the simulation, the car seems to be much smaller than what we expect in real-world cases when compared to the road. When I tried to check the width of the road (used as a reference), I couldn't find it in the code. So, could you give me some hints on where to find the width of the road?

Besides, when I checked the prius.urdf file, I noticed that the scale factor of chassis and wheels is "0.01 0.01 0.01". Does this mean that the unit in solidworks file is centimeter instead of millimeter? I would appreciate it if you could clarify this since I may need the right dimension for further modeling. Thanks in advance.

Cheers/Tianxiao

We hired a 3D modeling artist to create these models. I have a feeling that the scale of the prius car model is correct. He worked in millimeters for this particular model and we scaled it to meters, hence the mesh has a scale of 0.01.

For the MCity model. It looks like, we're trying to convert from inches to meters but off by a factor of 0.1. Scale currently is 0.254 which seems odd. I would have expected 0.0254. So I think the scale of this model may be incorrect and we need to figure out what unit it's created in.

Thanks for your quick reply! So if the scale of the car 0.01 is correct, does it mean that its size is kind of scaled up by a factor 10 since conversion from millimeters to meters should give out a scale of 0.001?

BTW, I just checked the coordinates of the car by driving the car to both sides of the road and then accessing the topic /bask_pose_ground_truth, and it turned out that the width of the road was around 14. So another two questions (sorry about so many lengthy questions): Is the unit of this absolute distance between two coordinates also meter? And is it scaled by 0.1 or not?

So if the scale of the car 0.01 is correct, does it mean that its size is kind of scaled up by a factor 10 since conversion from millimeters to meters should give out a scale of 0.001?

oops, then he probably worked in centimeters

I'll look in to what unit the mcity model is created in

Having setup the tf frames for the car, I believe it's scale is approximately correct.

It seems like no fix has been done on it yet. Do you guys plan to have a fix implemented soon?

This is a demo that runs, we're not actively work on it. If you want to test it with an updated scale and open a PR against it we'll try to find time to review it.

Is it possible to get the wheelbase of the vehicle and also the reference point on the vehicle, you are publishing odometry data to base_pose_ground_truth topic?