Camera-Server Crashes after Ark Flow Install/setup

Stefan Amundarain

Good day;

Our team was able to get an Ark Electronics Ark Flow running on the voxl2 (SDK 1.4.1, px4 1.14.0dev) and had success flying in position mode with the rangefinder set as EKF2_HGT_REF. We are running a 3 camera setup, Hires, Tracking_front, and PMD tof sensor.

After takeoff, we experience a hires camera failure [imx412] (it cuts out from QGC, maybe popping back up ~3-5seconds later for 1-3 frames, then crashes again. We have noticed the hires camera is the only one that crashes when using the ArkFlow, so we modified our camera server.conf to have only a single Hires_small_color stream active (to feed the tflite server) with none of the streams (tracking, tof, or other versions of the camera pipe) active to see if that would help but it did not.

We have disabled voxl-portal and qvio-server as well to make sure these were not utilizing camera info.

We are looking for guidance as we are planning to utilize ark flow for optical flow.

Link to a shared google drive with some images of what we are seeing. Happy to provide any other necessary info as requested.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Q1Q04wm0sMO3pmsGcjeaxDDduOxQCD4D?usp=drive_link

Alex Kushleyev

Hello, @Stefan-Amundarain ,

Let's try to narrow this down. Can you reproduce the issue without flying?

When the issue occurs, does the camera server restart completely, or you only lose hires camera feed. I suggest running the test on the bench with voxl-camera-server running in foreground so you can easily see what's happening in real time.

Please try to reproduce on the bench all 3 cameras (hires, tracking, TOF) working with your Ark Flow board working as well, then you can just move the platform by hand, if needed, to cause the camera failure and investigate what:

voxl-camera-server outputs
output of dmesg

We can go from there.

Also, can you please provide details how the ARK Flow is actually connected to VOXL2 (electrically) and also confirm that the issue does not happen at all without ARK Flow plugged in?

Also, using voxl-portal should not cause the camera server or the portal backend to get bogged down if your image is reasonable size (not full 4k image), but a small 720p is just fine.

You could view the 3 camera streams thru voxl portal during the test or just have the voxl-inspect-cam tool running and inspecting just the streams that you want (you can provide the streams to inspect as arguments to the tool, such as voxl-inspect-cam hires tracking_down tof_depth, etc. Either voxl-portal or voxl-inspect-cam should properly use the camera pipeline with all camera streaming, so that you can catch the fault.

Alex