This repository is the home to the source code and software documentation for the VRX simulation environment, which supports simulation of unmanned surface vehicles in marine environments.
- Designed in coordination with RobotX organizers, this project provides arenas and tasks similar to those featured in past and future RobotX competitions, as well as a description of the WAM-V platform.
- For RobotX competitors this simulation environment is intended as a first step toward developing tools prototyping solutions in advance of physical on-water testing.
- We also welcome users with simulation needs beyond RobotX. As we continue to improve the environment, we hope to offer support to a wide range of potential applications.
Research for autonomous navigation in the field of wheeled mobile robotics dates back to 1950’s and has grown quite strong in the past decade with advancement of computation power, availability of low-cost sensors and most importantly the large open-source community, whereas research in maritime robotics is younger comparatively mostly because of the challenges and large number of parameters to deal with when interacting with water. In this report I demonstrate autonomous navigation using a USV in an unknown (no pre-built map) water lake simulated environment. This small project is for the final selection round for a remote internship at the Autonomous Engineers Private Limited (AEPL), India.
- Create workspace and setup repo
mkdir -p ~/vrx_ws/src
cd ~/vrx_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/YashKSahu/vrx
source /opt/ros/noetic/setup.bash- Compile and Run
cd ~/vrx_ws
catkin_make
source ~/vrx_ws/devel/setup.bash
roslaunch vrx_gazebo vrx.launch- Bringup
- This launch file containes the basic nodes for the USV.
- robot state publisher
- joint state publisher
- tf
- localization
- odom filter node
- odom tf
- point cloud to laser scan
roslaunch vrx_gazebo bringup.launch- Thrust to Twist
- Most ROS packages are written w.r.t wheeled robots, and hence the parameters are also in accordance to it. A USV doesnt have wheels but thrusters instead to push it in water current. VRX has provided a thrust2twist node to convert thrust commands to equivalent geometry twist commands.
roslaunch vrx_gazebo usb_keydrive.launch- move_base Obstacle Avoidance
- I found three different ways of performing autonomous navigation
- With a pre-built known map
- gmapping for building map and then amcl and move_base to navigate
- Building and saving map simulataneously while autonomously navigating and exploring envrionment
- slam and move_base to map and navigate simultaneously
- or RTAB Map and move_base
- Without a known map, mapless navigation
- just pure move_base navigation, obstacles are avoided on exploration but map and obstacle information is lost globally
- With a pre-built known map
- Dynamic Window Approach (DWA), dwa_local_planner has been used.
- Given a global plan to follow and a costmap, the local planner produces velocity commands to send to a mobile base.
- DWA generates control velocities to achieve a goal position by using the dynamic model of the robot to optimize the distance to obstacles, its velocity, and the heading towards the goal.
- The basic idea of the Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) algorithm is as follows:
- Discretely sample in the robot's control space (dx,dy,dtheta)
- For each sampled velocity, perform forward simulation from the robot's current state to predict what would happen if the sampled velocity were applied for some (short) period of time.
- Evaluate (score) each trajectory resulting from the forward simulation, using a metric that incorporates characteristics such as: proximity to obstacles, proximity to the goal, proximity to the global path, and speed. Discard illegal trajectories (those that collide with obstacles).
- Pick the highest-scoring trajectory and send the associated velocity to the mobile base.
- Rinse and repeat.
roslaunch vrx_gazebo move_base.launch- Give a 2d navigation goal from rviz
usv_move_base.mp4
- Lawn Mower Navigation Script
- This script can work for both with and without obstacle cases, as only move_base is running in backround to send navigation goals to controllers.
- The script utilizes ROS action, move_base. It accepts goal from client as input and attempts to move the USV to the specified position/orientation in the world.
rosrun vrx_gazebo navigation_goal.cpp- currently stuck at rotate recovery.
Map update loop missed its desired rate of 4.0000Hz... the loop actually took 1.4040 seconds.
Aborting because a valid plan could not be found. Even after executing all recovery behaviorsIf you use the VRX simulation in your work, please cite our summary publication, Toward Maritime Robotic Simulation in Gazebo:
@InProceedings{bingham19toward,
Title = {Toward Maritime Robotic Simulation in Gazebo},
Author = {Brian Bingham and Carlos Aguero and Michael McCarrin and Joseph Klamo and Joshua Malia and Kevin Allen and Tyler Lum and Marshall Rawson and Rumman Waqar},
Booktitle = {Proceedings of MTS/IEEE OCEANS Conference},
Year = {2019},
Address = {Seattle, WA},
Month = {October}
}
- https://github.com/disaster-robotics-proalertas/usv_sim_lsa
- https://www.leorover.tech/guides/autonomous-navigation
- http://wiki.ros.org/navigation/Tutorials/RobotSetup
- https://git.scc.kit.edu/ugdrv/husky/-/tree/hokuyo
- https://github.com/Tinker-Twins/Husky
- https://geo-matching.com/usvs-unmanned-surface-vehicles/wam-v-16-asv
- http://wiki.ros.org/move_base
- https://answers.ros.org/question/351267/advice-for-slam-with-3d-lidar/
- http://wiki.ros.org/gmapping
- https://answers.ros.org/question/195523/warning-map-update-loop-missed-its-desired-rate-keeps-on-comming/
- http://wiki.ros.org/husky_navigation/Tutorials/Husky%20Move%20Base%20Demo
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sVrWRfWrEY
- https://robonation.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/11/VRX2022_Technical-Guide_v1.1.pdf
- vrx wiki
- https://github.com/YashKSahu/Localization-and-Mapping-in-ROS/blob/main/yobot/src/navigation_goal.cpp
- http://wiki.ros.org/navigation/Tutorials/SendingSimpleGoals
- http://wiki.ros.org/dwa_local_planner
This project is under active development to support the VRX and RobotX teams. We are adding and improving things all the time. Our primary focus is to provide the fundamental aspects of the robot and environment, but we rely on the community to develop additional functionality around their particular use cases.
If you have any questions about these topics, or would like to work on other aspects, please contribute. You can contact us directly (see below), submit an issue or, better yet, submit a pull request!
We continue to receive important improvements from the community. We have done our best to document this on our Contributors Wiki.
- Carlos Aguero caguero@openrobotics.org
- Michael McCarrin mrmccarr@nps.edu
- Brian Bingham bbingham@nps.edu