Posts made by brahim

@JP-Drone said in Support Photo/Video Capture via RC Switch:

MAV_CMD_IMAGE_START_CAPTURE

How are you handling the mavlink camera protocol exchange within voxl-px4? I know that there is the ability to forward commands to the GCS if using mission commands (but not manually flipping an RC switch).

Alternatively when using a joystick you can map a button to image capture: https://docs.px4.io/v1.15/en/camera/mavlink_v2_camera.html#manual-controllers

Currently the mavcam manager fully implements the camera protocol to send the ack for the incoming mavlink commands. It also handles the capture and video stream status (satisfies the mavlink camera protocol).

My only issue with implementing this is that the upstream voxl-px4 will not be camera protocol compliant and thus we are bypassing the entire protocol just to get camera image capture from the autopilot instead of the GCS (which also implements the same camera protocol). If you have a way to implement the protocol (even a stripped down version of it) please send a link so I can look at the code.

I am trying to import an external tsdf and esdf from a realsense lidar into voxl-mapper. I am looking at the code and only see the mesh is not used in loading a saved map, but just tsdf and esdf. The error I get is the following, which causes voxl-mapper to freeze.

Client requested load map.
full file name: /data/voxl-mapper/officetest/esdf
full file name: /data/voxl-mapper/officetest/tsdf
Version number mismatch! This needs to be handled...
Updating mesh

I grepped for the error statement but came up with no results, so I am not sure where in the stack the error is coming from. Any help is appreciated (edited)

Make sure these variables are set on the voxl2 and external pc:

ROS_DOMAIN_ID = 0
ROS_LOCALHOST_ONLY = 0

You can check if multicast is enabled on both sides with this command (assuming external pc is linux):

ifconfig | grep -i multicast

This should show multicast enabled for the interface (wifi or ethernet) connected to the external pc via network.

@jonathankampia, the way that voxl-microdds-agent works is that it wraps around the XRCE microdds agent binary from e-prosima, and bridges the px4 microdds topics to the DDS global data space (e.g. ROS2 topics).

The voxl-microdds-agent runs irrespective of any serialized message definitions, so it is just the transport. Probably not the issue, but if you still feel strongly that the agent is the issue, there are ways to test that.

Most likely, the mismatch is between px4_msgs and the voxl-px4 version. In that case serialized message definitions DO matter, and the mismatch could cause issues, but usually this is caught when the dds agent service runs (it will report errors you can view via systemctl status).

What sdk version are you using on the voxl2? You could checkout the submodule px4_msgs version that voxl-mpa-to-ros2 uses.

It would be difficult to troubleshoot without the actual offboard code to test, maybe post a snippet of your code?

For an offboard example using trajectory setpoints, you can also try this one which has been referenced a lot in the PX4 community

@tahawaru please pull down the latest dev branch: https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-mpa-to-ros2/-/tree/dev?ref_type=heads

You can rebuild with the dev branch and see if you can both ros2 topic echo and rosbag record the encoded images. Please be aware that you will need to manually decode the images somehow on the receiving end (your application) as there isn't a built-in way in ros2/rviz to decode.

@tahawaru there are a few intermediate steps to get ros2 offboard control:

• disable offboard_mode (set to false) in voxl-vision-hub.conf line 237: "offboard_mode": "false"

• Ensure voxl-microdds-agent is running. You can check by running systemctl status voxl-microdds-agent

• Once these steps are complete, and you have the ros2 offboard fig 8 running, you should be able to echo the offboard control mode info either in an adb shell or mavlink console:

In adb you can use the command px4-listener offboard_control_mode which should return this

 offboard_control_mode
    timestamp: 314055050 (0.031338 seconds ago)
    position: True
    velocity: False
    acceleration: False
    attitude: False
    body_rate: False
    actuator: False

• A way to verify the figure 8 ros2 node is sending setpoints to px4 is to echo trajectory setpoints: ros2 topic echo /fmu/in/trajectory_setpoint
• When you kill the ros2 offboard node, you can echo that offboard mode status again and the timestamp should go stale and no longer update.

Manual mode is not really representative of the ability to switch into offboard mode and send setpoints. You will need to be able to arm in position or hold mode first. If you do not have an rc controller then try to arm in hold mode. If you are not able to arm in either mode, then there is a preflight check fail somewhere that needs to be addressed first.

Please verify the PC data in rviz2. What you see in rviz2 should look exactly alike to what is shown in voxal portal for tof_pc. Note that the point step size is 12. See this guide for more info on pointcloud data message data

Point cloud data will look very different from image data, since the data field is constructed very different from BGR image formats.

I have replicated these results in a starling2 as well, with voxl-mpa-to-ros2 dev branch:

Note that you may need to spin up a static transform to see the pointcloud data in ROS:

ros2 run tf2_ros static_transform_publisher 0 0 0 0 0 0 map world 

@Captain-7th Are you able to arm and fly in position mode? According to the mavros state you are connected and the printout shows that the arming command is sent to the vehicle while in offboard, but it is possible there is a preflight check that is failing?

In the PerCameraMgr class, there is a function that process a single camera capture result (frame?) and prints the timestamp (meta.timestamp_ns).

We are attempting to compare the frame timestamp with the system time, which we have been able to do successfully, however it only looks like the camera frame is from hires small?

How can we distinguish between hires large and small in the hal3 camera manager code? We just need to compare timestamps but need to confirm if the metadata printed is from hires large or small, or both

Download
VERBOSE: 	Frame Timestamp: 1708331612528
	Sys Timestamp: 1708373675076
	Diff Timestamp: 42062548
VERBOSE: 	Gain: 54
VERBOSE: 	Exposure: 270328
VERBOSE: Received result from HAl3 for frame number 0
VERBOSE: Received 1 buffers from camera hires, partial result:0
VERBOSE: Received output buffer 0 from camera hires
VERBOSE: finished sending request for frame 5 for camera hires
VERBOSE: returning from SendOneCaptureRequest for frame 6 for camera hires
VERBOSE: hires procesing new buffer
VERBOSE: Camera: hires processing small vid frame
VERBOSE: added request for small video stream
VERBOSE: Sending request for frame 6 for camera hires for 1 streams
VERBOSE: Received result from HAl3 for frame number 4
VERBOSE: Received 0 buffers from camera hires, partial result:1
VERBOSE: Received result from HAl3 for frame number 1
VERBOSE: Received 0 buffers from camera hires, partial result:2
VERBOSE: Received metadata for frame 1 from camera hires
VERBOSE: 	Frame Timestamp: 1708398182893
	Sys Timestamp: 1708435426587
	Diff Timestamp: 37243694
VERBOSE: 	Gain: 54
VERBOSE: 	Exposure: 270328
VERBOSE: Received result from HAl3 for frame number 0
VERBOSE: Received 0 buffers from camera tof, partial result:2
VERBOSE: Received metadata for frame 0 from camera tof
VERBOSE: 	Frame Timestamp: 1708453167425
	Sys Timestamp: 1708454078149
	Diff Timestamp: 910724
VERBOSE: 	Gain: 0
VERBOSE: 	Exposure: 0
VERBOSE: Received result from HAl3 for frame number 1
VERBOSE: Received 1 buffers from camera hires, partial result:0
VERBOSE: Received output buffer 1 from camera hires
VERBOSE: finished sending request for frame 6 for camera hires
VERBOSE: returning from SendOneCaptureRequest for frame 7 for camera hires
VERBOSE: added request for small video stream

I am looking to integrate a neopixel (WS2815) on the VOXL2, but was concerned that the SPI gpio can not be re-purposed for general purpose GPIO. There is a voxl2 linux guide that shows a gpi-mod kernel driver so there is concern that we would not be able to access the GPIO to faciliate the neopixel driver signal in user space (like how RPI.GPIO python library works on a raspberry pi)

@Captain-7th Can you do a rostopic echo of

/mavros/state

You should be able to see info printed if the autopilot is connected or disconnected.

We are extensively testing camera failure cases on OpenVINS using the cvp/VFT instead of the default 'vins' tracker.

The big issue for is is that there are some flyaways still occuring in nominal conditions even when using 2-camera tracking (non-stereo). More importantly there doesn't seem to be true redundancy if one camera fails. It makes sense in a stereo configuration if one camera fails and tracking no longer works, but in the cvp multi-camera (front and downward) setup, shouldn't the other camera still track features and hold position?

Is there a timeline for when VFT will be stable, and is it actively being worked for a stable release in the near future?

One thing that helped with qvio feature tracking was the ability to use voxl-logger, but this functionality doesn't exist yet for openvins, hence using the voxl portal vio page to see when tracking fails

What hardware are you using? Starling v1 with upgraded motors
What version of software are you using? See below
How have you configured the software? See below
Do you have any logs? No logs, but vio page showing a flyaway in nominal conditions:
Can you share pictures of your setup? Front and down camera (front and down are ar0144 on my colleague's setup, but i have an ov7251 front and ar0144 down
Have you looked at the source code? Yes, looked at voxl-feature-tracker on gitlab and there are some apparent bugs in the software or it is not finished

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hw platform:  M0054
mach.var:     1.0.0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
voxl-suite:   1.2.0

}, {
                       "enable":       true,
                       "group_name":   "tracking_FDR",
                       "output_pipe":  "tracking_feats",
                       "overlay_pipe": "tracking_feat_overlay",
                       "group_cams":   [{
                                       "enable":       true,
                                       "input_pipe":   "tracking_front",
                                       "tracker_type": "cvp",
                                       "num_features": 30
                               }, {
                                       "enable":       true,
                                       "input_pipe":   "tracking_down",
                                       "tracker_type": "cvp",
                                       "num_features": 30
                               }, {
                                       "enable":       false,
                                       "input_pipe":   "tracking_rear",
                                       "tracker_type": "cvp",
                                       "num_features": 30
                               }]

               }, {

@Alexander-Saunders can you try the following patch to the Dockerfile?

I noticed that the mavsdk 3rd party package updated their header files to include a filesystem header that is incompatible with standard cpp libraries on ubuntu 18.04, hence switching the dockerfile to focal instead of bionic. You can save the text in a *.patch file (e.g. "filesystem.patch") and then run

git apply filesystem.patch

Alternatively just switch the docker base image from "bionic" to "focal"

diff --git a/Dockerfile b/Dockerfile
index c38a5c7..08e668b 100644
--- a/Dockerfile
+++ b/Dockerfile
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-FROM arm64v8/ubuntu:bionic
+FROM arm64v8/ubuntu:focal
 
 WORKDIR /home
 
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ RUN wget -O - https://apt.kitware.com/keys/kitware-archive-latest.asc 2>/dev/nul
 RUN apt-add-repository 'deb https://apt.kitware.com/ubuntu/ bionic main'
 RUN apt-get update
 RUN apt-get install -y cmake build-essential colordiff git doxygen -y
-RUN apt-get install -y python3 python3-pip -y 
+RUN apt-get install -y python3 python3-pip -y
 RUN apt-get install -y git libxml2-dev libxslt-dev curl
 
 RUN git clone https://github.com/mavlink/MAVSDK.git

@Alexander-Saunders I am testing a fix for this issue as we speak. I've sourced the problem to a Mavsdk dependency that had a recent upstream change which is causing issues on the voxl2 build image script.

@Darshit-Desai Here is the output from echo'ing local position.

voxl2:~/colcon_ws$ ros2 topic list
/fmu/in/obstacle_distance
/fmu/in/offboard_control_mode
/fmu/in/onboard_computer_status
/fmu/in/sensor_optical_flow
/fmu/in/telemetry_status
/fmu/in/trajectory_setpoint
/fmu/in/vehicle_attitude_setpoint
/fmu/in/vehicle_command
/fmu/in/vehicle_mocap_odometry
/fmu/in/vehicle_rates_setpoint
/fmu/in/vehicle_trajectory_bezier
/fmu/in/vehicle_trajectory_waypoint
/fmu/in/vehicle_visual_odometry
/fmu/out/failsafe_flags
/fmu/out/position_setpoint_triplet
/fmu/out/sensor_combined
/fmu/out/timesync_status
/fmu/out/vehicle_attitude
/fmu/out/vehicle_control_mode
/fmu/out/vehicle_local_position
/fmu/out/vehicle_odometry
/fmu/out/vehicle_status
/parameter_events
/rosout
voxl2:~/colcon_ws$ ros2 topic echo /fmu/out/vehicle_local_position
timestamp: 1716299017260605
timestamp_sample: 1716299017259933
xy_valid: false
z_valid: true
v_xy_valid: false
v_z_valid: true
x: -0.015882886946201324
y: -0.006520443130284548
z: 3.26619815826416
delta_xy: [-9.292006097894046e-08, -1.9959152552928572e-07]
xy_reset_counter: 1
delta_z: 0.0
z_reset_counter: 1
vx: 0.0007984319818206131
vy: -0.001192234456539154
vz: 0.006735446862876415
z_deriv: 0.014136962592601776
delta_vxy: [-1.0643154382705688e-05, -2.2861408069729805e-05]
vxy_reset_counter: 1
delta_vz: 1.583993434906006e-05
vz_reset_counter: 1
ax: 0.042993903160095215
ay: -0.06323475390672684
az: -0.10127022862434387
heading: -0.12067540735006332
delta_heading: 0.0
heading_reset_counter: 0
heading_good_for_control: false
xy_global: false
z_global: false
ref_timestamp: 0
ref_lat: .nan
ref_lon: .nan
ref_alt: .nan
dist_bottom: 0.10000000149011612
dist_bottom_valid: false
dist_bottom_sensor_bitfield: 0
eph: 0.012850395403802395
epv: 0.3351651430130005
evh: 0.04047877714037895
evv: 0.06853056699037552
dead_reckoning: true
vxy_max: .inf
vz_max: .inf
hagl_min: .inf
hagl_max: .inf
---

Voxl version

system-image: 1.7.4-M0054-14.1a-perf
kernel:       #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Feb 9 21:59:24 UTC 2024 4.19.125
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hw platform:  M0054
mach.var:     1.0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
voxl-suite:   1.1.3-1
Packages:
Repo:  http://voxl-packages.modalai.com/ ./dists/qrb5165/sdk-1.1/binary-arm64/
Last Updated: 2024-05-21 13:30:13
List:
kernel-module-voxl-fsync-mod-4.19.125     1.0-r0
kernel-module-voxl-gpio-mod-4.19.125      1.0-r0
kernel-module-voxl-platform-mod-4.19.125  1.0-r0
libmodal-cv                               0.4.0
libmodal-exposure                         0.1.0
libmodal-journal                          0.2.2
libmodal-json                             0.4.3
libmodal-pipe                             2.9.2
libqrb5165-io                             0.4.2
libvoxl-cci-direct                        0.2.1
libvoxl-cutils                            0.1.1
mv-voxl                                   0.1-r0
qrb5165-bind                              0.1-r0
qrb5165-dfs-server                        0.2.0
qrb5165-imu-server                        1.0.1
qrb5165-rangefinder-server                0.1.1
qrb5165-slpi-test-sig                     01-r0
qrb5165-system-tweaks                     0.2.6
qrb5165-tflite                            2.8.0-2
voxl-bind-spektrum                        0.1.0
voxl-camera-calibration                   0.5.3
voxl-camera-server                        1.8.9
voxl-ceres-solver                         2:1.14.0-10
voxl-configurator                         0.5.2
voxl-cpu-monitor                          0.4.7
voxl-docker-support                       1.3.0
voxl-elrs                                 0.1.3
voxl-esc                                  1.4.0
voxl-feature-tracker                      0.3.2
voxl-flow-server                          0.3.3
voxl-fsync-mod                            1.0-r0
voxl-gphoto2-server                       0.0.10
voxl-gpio-mod                             1.0-r0
voxl-jpeg-turbo                           2.1.3-5
voxl-lepton-server                        1.2.0
voxl-libgphoto2                           0.0.4
voxl-libuvc                               1.0.7
voxl-logger                               0.3.5
voxl-mavcam-manager                       0.5.3
voxl-mavlink                              0.1.1
voxl-mavlink-server                       1.3.2
voxl-microdds-agent                       2.4.1-0
voxl-modem                                1.0.8
voxl-mongoose                             7.7.0-1
voxl-mpa-to-ros                           0.3.7
voxl-mpa-to-ros2                          0.0.2
voxl-mpa-tools                            1.1.3
voxl-neopixel-manager                     0.0.3
voxl-open-vins                            0.4.4
voxl-open-vins-server                     0.2.18
voxl-opencv                               4.5.5-2
voxl-platform-mod                         1.0-r0
voxl-portal                               0.6.3
voxl-px4                                  1.14.0-2.0.63
voxl-px4-imu-server                       0.1.2
voxl-px4-params                           0.3.3
voxl-qvio-server                          1.0.0
voxl-remote-id                            0.0.9
voxl-ros2-foxy                            0.0.1
voxl-streamer                             0.7.4
voxl-suite                                1.1.3-1
voxl-tag-detector                         0.0.4
voxl-tflite-server                        0.3.1
voxl-utils                                1.3.8
voxl-uvc-server                           0.1.6
voxl-vision-hub                           1.7.3
voxl2-system-image                        1.7.4-r0
voxl2-wlan                                1.0-r0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

px4_msgs branch

voxl2:~/colcon_ws/src/px4_msgs(release/1.14)$ git branch
* release/1.14

What px4_msgs branch or tag are you using? Please post the branch name. The px4_msgs repo branch is in lockstep with the PX4 branch release, so if there is a mismatch I would expect deserialization issues.

I notice with auto exposure params if you are overexposing the image the lighter features stand out even more if there are darker areas in the image (since it's a mean sample value) but this could lead to issues with quality. Underexposing the image you end up getting dark images if there is a window or other large light source in the camera frame, resulting again in quality issues.

There is a case for image masking but I have not seen it been used in real applications: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228405828_Automatic_camera_exposure_control

@Darshit-Desai when you are subscribing to /hires_large_color or /hires_large_grey are you planning to do some kind of image processing on these image messages in ROS? These are huge 4k images and I'm not sure how much the ros CV bridge can handle. One option is to resize the images since that typically complements image processing for whatever consumer subscribes to these image topics and will result in a speed up. Rectification also can be used to reduce the image warp.

Another option is to play with the image sensor encodings and find something more manageable in ROS and computational power required.

I am trying to debug some intermittent qvio server failure on a starling. When the starling boots up I get qvio overlay in voxl-portal just fine and then lose it after about 40s (my wifi connection disconnects). Everything comes back except qvio overlay on voxl portal.

When I manually run qvio server through adb it fails on 'waiting for imu'. I manually start voxl-imu-server and then run qvio server again with debug enabled and got the following:
I can see qvio server is still connected as a client under voxl-imu-server:

I am clueless as to what is bringing down my connection and why qvio seems to be related to what is failing. This issue is intermittent and sometimes I am able to maintain qvio overlay in voxl portal. Sometimes qvio overlay will come back after a few min of being in a degraded state and not showing any stats on voxl portal.

To clarify the services all remain running when my connection gets hosed. I tried voxl-inspect-services and they all appear to be running whereas my wifi connection is what gets hosed (but recovers). When the disconnect happens I lose QGC mavlink to the starling and the streams go black. I ping the voxl IP and get nothing until the connection recovers