enav_ros

enav_ros package

Lightweight ROS package to interact and visualize data from the energy-aware planetary navigation dataset. First make sure you read the project's main README.md located in the root directory of this repository for preliminary instructions.

Visualization of rover's reference pose estimates

To visualize the pose estimates generated through the combination of VINS-Fusion (stereo imagery + GPS data), IMU data and reference elevation data contained in a rosbag (run1_base.bag for example), start the main launch file the following way:

roslaunch enav_ros main.launch bag:=/complete/path/to/run1_base.bag map_dir:/path/to/map/directory start_time:=55.0
# Then, when everything loaded, hit spacebar to play the rosbag

Arguments:

• bag: the complete path to the base .bag file desired
• map_dir (optional, default is false): the complete path to the directory containing the map (.tif) files. If unspecified, no map will be loaded.
• start_time (optional, default is 0): the start time (seconds) into the rosbag. This is particularly useful when visualizing the reference pose estimates, since it allows the user to skip the initialization phase of VINS-Fusion. For convenience, here are the start_time values to skip the VINS-Fusion initialization for each run:

Run 1	Run 2	Run 3	Run 4	Run 5	Run 6
55.0	20.0	25.0	25.0	20.0	38.0

The above command will load a pre-configured RViz windows with a model of the rover and corresponding TF tree. Note that at first, the default view will be fixed on the origin of the terrain ("csa_origin"). To play the bag, hit spacebar in the same terminal window.

Merging all the data (including point clouds) into one rosbag

As mentioned on the dataset's web page, the point clouds of each run were saved in a separate rosbag for convenience. While it is possible to manually start both bags (base and clouds_only) more or less simultaneously in separate terminal windows, another option is to merge them into a "master" rosbag file using the bagedit package. Here's a sample usage of the package's bagmerge.py script:

# Terminal 1
roscore

# Terminal 2
rosrun bagedit bagmerge.py -o run1_master.bag run1_base.bag run1_clouds_only.bag

Notes:

• Make sure to have enough free space on your device for the merged rosbag (equivalent to the combined size of the base and clouds_only bags).

• The bagedit package works with Python2.7. An alternative to installing a Python2.7 environment is to fix the bagmerge.py script so that it runs properly in Python 3.7. This can be accomplished by fixing (or commenting out) its print functions (i.e. change every print "text" to print("text")).

The merged rosbag data can then be visualized following a similar procedure to that described above:

roslaunch enav_ros main.launch bag:=/complete/path/to/run1_base.bag map_dir:/path/to/map/directory start_time:=55.0
# Then, when everything loaded, hit spacebar to play the rosbag