VOA/April Tag Expected Release for 0.3.4

[PawelJ]

Hello to the ModalAI dev team,

First I want to say thanks for the great work and quick respones to questions. I have been using 0.3.4 for a couple weeks and have been enjoying some of the quality of life improvements your team has made. Specifically the updates to running and inspecting systemctl packages @Alex-Gardner informed me about. Reading through the forums I see that you are getting close to having the vision features available for 0.3.4, and was wondering if you had an ETA for that?

My current work requires a custom vvpx4 where I can log data during offboard flights, so I had to update to 0.3.4 to be able to update packages without running into the strict version requirements of 0.2.0. Right now I'm a bit stalled since I need the april tag localization along with my modified vvpx4, so I was wondering if you had any ETA for the 0.3.4 updates.

Alternatively, would there be a way for me to compile a slightly modified vvpx4 on the 0.2.0 release? When I was first trying this I ran into some issues (forum post here, posts 7 and 8 specifically), which is where I was told to update to 0.3.4. Any estimate is appreciated, as I am trying to decide whether I should hold off on development for the 0.3.4 release, or try and get the modified vvpx4 to work on the old 0.2.0 release. I also don't want to try downgrading if you don't think it will work to avoid having to recalibrate the sensors.

Cheers,

Pawel

[PawelJ]

Hello,

I was wondering if there is any update on this. I would really appreciate an ETA, however rough, so I can try to plan work accordingly. I need to be able to run a custom vvpx4 and have access to the camera server to read from the highres data and for using april tags. It doesn't seem to be currently possible since a custom vvpx4 requires 0.3.4 and the april tags / highres cam manager require 0.2.0. I've currently shifted work since it seems like the updates to 0.3.4 will fix all of the issues I'm having, but would like to know an ETA to decide whether or not to continue debugging my issues.

Cheers,

Pawel

[Chad Sweet]

Getting VOA and tag detection back on the stable branch is still a WIP, but there is progress you can follow along.

Nothing is documented yet, but there is VOA functionality on the dev branch. It has had limited flight testing. See these projects:

https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/modal-pipe-architecture/voxl-dfs-server/-/tree/dev

https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/modal-pipe-architecture/voxl-vision-px4/-/blob/dev/src/voa_manager.c

There is also a first cut of the tag detector here: https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/modal-pipe-architecture/voxl-tag-detector/-/tree/master

For each of the features, the process of documenting will likely uncover some things that need to be changed. After that though it should be promoted to stable. The timeline is likely mid-June

[PawelJ]

Hi @Chad-Sweet ,

Thank you for the details. I appreciate the links for following along so I can begin some of my integration process. Apologies for chomping at the bit, I'm excited to get the entire system up and running

[PawelJ]

@Chad-Sweet Is there any documentation as to what needs to be updated for the April Tag / VOA feature update?

[PawelJ]

Pasting a response I got from @Alex-Gardner (thanks!).

"...download the new system image with full voxl-suite (voxl_platform_3-3-0-0.4.6-b.tar.gz) which will have all of these packages from https://developer.modalai.com/asset. If you extract the archive there will be an install script which will reflash the system image over adb (giving you the option to not wipe the data partition, if you have other things on the drone you should make sure to back them up) and then install the new voxl-suite."