Indoor Navigation using 4 Depth Sensors
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Hello everyone,
I am working on developing an indoor navigation solution using 4 Time-of-Flight sensors to provide 360-degree obstacle detection and mapping. The sensor board provided by ModalAI can only support one ToF sensor as per my understanding. I would like to understand if there is any way that I can integrate 4 ToF sensors and get their respective data into VOXL2 for post-processing.
Kindly feel free to reach out if there are any clarifications required on the requirement.
Looking forward to hearing back soon.Regards,
Ashwin -
Hello @ashwin ,
The M0040 TOF sensor, which is now discontinued, would have been potentially useful, since you should be able to connect 4 (although we never tested that). Nevertheless, this particular sensor is EOL.
The new TOF sensor (we sometimes refer to as TOF V2), (https://www.modalai.com/products/m0178) unfortunately has different power requirements compared to TOF V1, so TOF V2 cannot be connected into standard interposers like M0076 (single) or M0135 (dual).
At this point, I think only one TOF V2 is supported.
@Vinny , can you please confirm? Are we planning to have any other interposers that would allow multiple TOF V2 connected to VOXL2?
Thanks!
Alex
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We are really only anticipating 1 ToF per system. Not sure if any SW efforts have even tried more than 1 and if it's not on our roadmap, it could take a while to support.
However, if a second one is needed it would need to be on a separate camera group on VOXL 2 (not VOXL 2 Mini, as there is not enough system current at 5V to drive two ToFs reliably due to their high current demands).
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Thanks for the information. It would be really helpful in our decision making towards our project planning.
Regards,
Ashwin -
@ashwin , from software point of view, running multiple TOF V2 sensors on VOXL2 is not an issue, but as Vinny said, the power requirements would put a limit of a single TOF sensor per VOXL camera connector (J6, J7, J8), so that would mean at most 3 TOF sensors connected to J6L, J7L and J8L (camera slots 0, 2, 4 in order to avoid i2c slave address conflicts -- this is more of a note to self
).However, assuming the SW can support these 3 TOF sensors, i am not sure we actually have the required interposers / flex cables to connect 3 TOF V2 sensors to the 3 camera ports. @Vinny , what do you think?
Also, @ashwin , would you need any other cameras connected to VOXL2 besides the multiple TOF sensors?
Alex
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Hi @Alex-Kushleyev
That's correct, since we have not supported it or tried it, there is no elegant HW solution.
We've recently completed the M0172 adapter which breaks out a uCOAX on the upper group + 40-pin Molex (for ToF) on the lower group from a single camera group.
We have not made this product available yet for purchase, but looks like this:
If this is something that interests you, I encourage you to ask our sales team using the contact page about it (we should have a bunch in stock it just has not been a priority for us): https://www.modalai.com/pages/contact-us
