Questions for VOXL2 and Sentinel

kooksun Lee

Hello, we are planning to operate the VOXL2 development drone under the following environmental conditions :

Indoor (GPS Denied)
Only Wi-Fi(LTE is not available in our case). Currently, we are planning to operate the drone with Wi-Fi 6 mesh network using multiple routers (such as https://www.netgear.com/home/wifi/mesh/mk63/). On the other hands, we would like to install Microhard, if it becomes necessary in our project.
Due to poor lighting conditions (relatively dark), we are considering to install custom LEDs on the drone. So a small amount of payload (~500g) might be added.

We decided to choose a Sentinel(w option: 2.4/5Ghz Wi-Fi model).

I have a few questions:

Can I install or replace Microhard on Sentinel(w option: 2.4/5Ghz Wi-Fi model) by myself?
In the development guide, the drone supports ROS Indigo/Melodic version. Unfortunately, our host PC is already running on the latest ROS version called noetic. Do you have any test results in this case?
- Host PC: ROS noetic, Ubuntu 20.04
- Drone: ROS Indigo (https://docs.modalai.com/setup-ros-on-host-pc/)
I would like to purchase additional propellers, but I cannot find this option.
Unlike Seeker (https://docs.modalai.com/seeker-user-guide-vio/), there is no description of the 3d point cloud data (pcd) stream for Sentinel(, instead it provides odometry information based on VIO). I would like to know that VOXL2(the core of Sentinel) provides some API's to help measuring depth map(eg disparity maps or pcd).
As far as I know, Sentinel's VIO algorithm shows amazing performance. Unfortunately, this performance might be limited under some lighting conditions. We hope to understand these conditions(brightness, Lux, Lumens, etc) before installing custom LEDs. Can you provide us any information considering brightness, please?

modaltb

1] Yes, the Microhard modem can be installed later, we also can install for you with this variant here. Also note that if you go with this option, you need to add the Microhard modem product as a separate item (as although we are good with robot software, Shopify software for carts is proving to be hard! ;)). But I'm swapping modems off my setup often so it's doable.

2] For VOXL2, you can just use apt-get and install the ROS you want, does not need to be indigo (that was for VOXL1). For VOXL1 we had to provide pre-build packages, but luckily VOXL2 can use normal package management!

3] You can find those here: https://www.modalai.com/products/sentinel-propellers

4] Seeker has Time of Flight module, whereas Sentinel has two stereo pairs, but the voxl-dfs-server can produce point clouds from these --> https://docs.modalai.com/voxl-dfs-server and https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/qrb5165-dfs-server/. We can get more info for you if needed, just let me know.

5] Let me ping the team here who knows better info than I on this question and we'll get back to you.

kooksun Lee

@modaltb said in Questions for VOXL2 and Sentinel:

4] Seeker has Time of Flight module, whereas Sentinel has two stereo pairs, but the voxl-dfs-server can produce point clouds from these --> https://docs.modalai.com/voxl-dfs-server and https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/qrb5165-dfs-server/. We can get more info for you if needed, just let me know.

@modaltb,

Thanks for your kind reply. Now we will shop Sentinel!

After receiving the goods, some experiments will be performed against various lighting conditions. Taking into account the test results, we need to build a new hardware (with custom LEDs) using only the VOXL2 flight deck (https://www.modalai.com/products/voxl-2-flight-deck?variant=40503626039347).

Therefore, it would be very helpful if your team could tell us about any design considerations in our case.

Thank you.

xav04

Hi @modaltb, regarding question 2, I can't install ROS noetic on voxl 2 because it uses Ubuntu 18.04. I wonder if it is possible to install Ubuntu 20.04 on voxl2 without it affecting anything?

modaltb

I don't believe it's something that can be easily done on your end.

We are looking at upgrading our system image to ubuntu 20 but haven't set a release date at this time.

xav04

@modaltb Thanks for your reply. So is there a way I can use ROS Noetic in Voxl2?

modaltb

I haven't done this yet, but docker works (natively, don't use voxl-docker) and then you could use an ubuntu20 container on target perhaps? You would need to launch the container with networking setup to route the traffic.

Kashish Garg

@modaltb Hello, I was curious if there were any new plans to support Ubuntu20 in an upcoming System Image release. I apologize if this question gets asked to death, I am new to these forums.

Thanks

modaltb

Hi, we have it on our roadmap but not defined release, we're hoping to do this over summer time. There's a pending Ubuntu 20 release from Qualcomm that we can use but need to port it over to our platform etc.