BOSON camera

[Jetson Nano]

Hello @Alex-Kushleyev @Vinny @Eric-Katzfey @tom

I would know whether boson is completely supported by voxl2 or is it still under development for J8 pinout.
Can I use the boson for tracking ?

Could you share what is the purpose voxl-feature-tracker, voxl-flow-server and voxl-lepton-tracker.

[Alex Kushleyev]

Hi @Jetson-Nano,

Boson is supported on VOXL2 and VOXL2 mini. See info here : https://docs.modalai.com/M0153/#hardware-requirements

You will need either M0162 or M0181 adapter for plugging Boson into VOXL2 as well as M0201 (which plugs into the back of Boson and provides the coax connector.

What you probably want is the following connection:

[Boson] + [M0201] + [coax cable] + [M0181 J1] -> [VOXL2 J8]

We don't have an out-of-the-box solution for tracking features using Boson. You would need to worry about FFC interrupting the image stream (FFC can be disabled or configured not to run very frequently).

I will find some documentation regarding the feature tracker question.

Alex

[Jetson Nano]

@Alex-Kushleyev Thank you for reverting back. I will go through the documentation. If I disable the shutter will it work with causing any issue with respect to FFC.
Also I would wish use any other thermal camera with usb camera support, can it be used for localisation through QVIO, I will be required to create a MIPI communication, right?

I will find some documentation regarding the feature tracker question.- looking forward for your response.

[Alex Kushleyev]

@Jetson-Nano ,

We have not tried QVIO with Boson, it may work (but we can't really support that). The boson output is usually a bit fuzzy, so i am not sure how the feature detection will work, but it may be ok. Disabling FFC will definitely resolve the gaps in the frame feed, but disabling the FFC will also affect the Boson image quality, which may degrade over time.

If you wanted to use any USB (thermal) camera with VIO, you would just have to use voxl-uvc-server to publish the images to mpa, so that voxl-qvio-server can subscribe to them. The only issue is that the uvc interface does not provide accurate timestamp of the camera, but it may be ok just to use the time of arrival of the frame. QVIO does estimate the time offset between the IMU and camera, so as long as the timestamp is consistently captured, it should be ok..

Alex