This week, I was able to complete the IMU and UWB integrations with the UI by publishing the corresponding ROS topics (/catombot/imu/heading_rad and /catombot/position) to the UI’s live ROS bridge with the micro-ROS agent docker container running. This closes the loop from multi-anchor ranging to something an operator can interpret in real time, which was the main integration milestone.
The remaining issue is the quality of the pose, not whether it appears on the screen. Raw UWB fixes are noisy as the bot’s positions appear jittery on the UI, so the next steps would be to have sensor fusion properly implemented. For UWB + IMU fusion, the IMU will be used for acceleration, which is integrated into position while letting UWB correct drift and anchor the global position. This can be done with a Kalman filter that can sooth UWB updates and uses IMU between fixes so the displayed pose and mapping see less high-frequency noise.
UI displays the x, y, z coordinates of the bot/UWB’s location with respect to the 3 UWB anchors surrounding it.
The UI records and properly updates the bot’s position based on the latest coordinate recorded by the UWB. It does, however, vibrate despite the UWB being stationary. Hence, sensor fusion with Kalman filtering is needed.