What I did the week before

My last week was spent on getting kinect2_bridge to work with the camera.

What I did this week

This week was spent on developing the mapping software for mapping from 3d point cloud to 3d voxel grid.

I started with installing octomap and developing the mapping software on the Kria board. However, after spending some time doing this, I realized that this is not a good idea due to Kria’s limited processing capability — it’s scalar core is rather slow, which becomes a limiting factor in development, and due to Kria’s graphics driver issues (that I have noted from last week’s report) I could not use octovis to easily visualize the mapping and debug it visually.

So then I moved to my own Linux workstation for software development. Since I have already spent some time learning octomap, everything went smooth initially. Then, as I attempted to integrate calibration for scene mapping, I realized that it is much harder than we expected. We have talked about this in our Wednesday meeting and I have taken the advise from our faculty mentor and am now in the processing of using grids to calibrate mapping.

The mapping software isn’t done yet, but I plan to get the software running stand-alone (i.e. on my workstation at least, or on Kria if I get the chance) before our interim demo.

There are also some issues with packing the software as a ROS 2 node and getting it to receive point cloud data via ROS pipes. I’ll look into it as well.

What I plan to be doing next week

As mentioned above, try to finish the initial developmeng of the mapping software and get it to work on my workstation. Then, figure out how to package it as a ROS 2 node and start integrate it with RRT* (this will probably take another week or so).