This week, I improved the live UI’s robot position stability by adding stronger filtering to the UWB position stream. Previously, when the robot was stationary, the displayed x, y values would still drift by 5-10 cm amounts, causing visible jitter that messes up the robot’s UI location on the map. I tightened the stationary deadband so tiny UWB changes are held at the previous position, which makes the bot marker appear much steadier when the physical robot is not moving.
Teleop robot with sensors and a camera with minimal jitter
I also began implementing the autonomous navigation for the robot by adding a live autonomy control path that converts selected goals or frontier targets into geometry_msgs/Twist commands and publishes them to the same ROS topic used by teleoperation (/catombot/id_1/commands/velocity). This means the physical robot can be controlled through the existing firmware path since the ESP32 already subscribes to that velocity topic and applies linear.x / angular.z to the motors. However, I still need to make several fixes, including but not limited to making the IMU have proper calibration so the point clouds are always in the same direction as the robot’s front LiDAR view, and also ensuring the robot doesn’t drift too far off from the target and frontier cells.
Robot moving autonomously (not fully working tho)
For next week, I plan to address those issues as well as refactor the UI to accommodate 2 robots doing the search and creating an alert when the tag is detected.