Wiki Index

3D Printers

This article is a technology overview of the fundamentals of 3D Printers, especially “Fused Filament Modeling” (FFM) & “Fused Deposition Modeling” (FDM). It explains the fundamentals of 3D Printer technology and applications. It should be useful for those considering working with, designing, or modifying a 3D printer. It is not...

Building a Light Weight Custom Simulator

Overview

Cartographer SLAM ROS Integration

Cartographer is a LiDAR-based SLAM algorithm built by Google that is very efficient and accurate at building large maps. From testing Cartographer qualitatively performs better than other ROS SLAM algorithms such as gmapping and rtab-map.

Design considerations for ROS Architectures

Overview Over the past few months we have dicussed various ROS architectures, changed it at least two times in a major way and have come to appreciate the importance of designing a good architecture. We have also realized there are several important factors which need to be considered before...

Hardware-in-Loop and Software-in-Loop Testing

Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing is a test methodology that can be used throughout the development of real-time embedded controllers to reduce development time and improve the effectiveness of testing. As the complexity of electronic control units (ECUs) increases, the number of combinations of tests required to ensure correct functionality and response...

NDT Matching with Autoware

Normal Distribution Transform (NDT)

Oculus Prime Navigation

There are multiple techniques to carry out way-point navigation on the Oculus Prime platform using the navigation stack.

Qtcreator User-Interface with ROS

Qtcreator is a popular user interface integrated development environment (IDE) that can interface easily with ROS. It supports multiple platforms, such as x86 desktop, arm-based embedded devices, and mobile platforms such as Android and iOS. However, this tutorial will focus on using this tool to create a user interface with...

Spawning and Controlling Vehicles in CARLA

This is a short tutorial on using agents and traffic tools in CARLA. This wiki contains details about: Spawning Vehicles in CARLA Controlling these spawned Vehicles using CARLA’s PID controllers.

Adafruit GPS

Adaptive Monte Carlo Localization

What is a particle filter? Particle filter are initialized by a very high number of particles spanning the entire state space. As you get additional measurements, you predict and update your measurements which makes your robot have a multi-modal posterior distribution. This is a big difference from a Kalman...

Altium Circuit Maker

Altium Circuitmaker is a Community Driven PCB Design Application. Circuitmaker can be downloaded here. It requires a user account since most of its features are cloud-based.

AprilTags

AprilTags is a visual fiducial system, useful for a wide variety of tasks including augmented reality, robotics, and camera calibration. The tags provide a means of identification and 3D positioning, even in low visibility conditions. The tags act like barcodes, storing a small amount of information (tag ID), while also...

Arduino

This tutorial covers the basics of different Arduinos, and how to implement common functions with them.

Asctec Pelican UAV Setup Guidance

This document acts as a tutorial on how to set up a Asctec Pelican UAV for autonomous waypoint navigation using ros pakage asctec_mav_framework. We are setting up an Asctec Quadrotor Pelican running with Ubuntu 14.04 and pre-installed ROS-jade.

A* Implementation Guide

Introduction This wiki aims to serve as a brief introduction and implementation guideline for A* search, specifically applied to robot motion planning. This will discuss how the algorithm functions, important design aspects in the pipeline, common knobs to tune, and efficiency considerations. The specific guidance and notes will be...

Amazon Web Services Quickstart

This article will cover the basics of remote login on an Ubuntu machine. More specifically this will help you set up your AWS machine and serve as a tutorial to launch, access and manage your AWS Instance. Launching an EC2 Instance First, we will have to sign up on...

Azure Block Detection

This article presents an overview of object detection using the Azure camera without relying on learning-based methods. It is utilized within our Robot Autonomy project, specifically for detecting Jenga blocks and attempting to assemble them.

Blink(1) LED

Introduction Using an LED indicator is an extremely useful troubleshooting technique. The Blink(1) USB RGB LED makes this very easy and straightforward. Using this product can help determine the state of the robot without needing to have a direct data link. This can be useful on mobile robots,...

Bluetooth Socket Programming using Python PyBluez

This tutorial is intended at providing a primer into Bluetooth programming in general and getting started with PyBluez, a Python Bluetooth module. Bluetooth socket programming is similar to socket programming used by network developers for TCP/IP connections and familiarity with that paradigm will certainly aid understanding although it is not...

Boost C++ Libraries

Iterations in maps and vectors using boost libraries

Using Boost libraries for maps and vectors in C++ for ROS.

Cable Management

Effective cable management is essential for servicing, debugging and creating reliable robotic systems. Cabling is often regarded as one of the less glamorous parts of electrical engineering, but it is an essential and an extremely important part of creating a complete system.

Camera Calibration

It is quite common for projects to involve vision systems, but despite this most teams working with cameras ignore the basic advantages of calibrating a camera properly. Not only does a good calibration lead to better quality of data in form of images captured but also reduces overall errors in...

IMU-Camera Calibration using Kalibr

This tutorial will help you in setting up the Kaliber library developed at ETH Zurich for combined IMU-Camera calibration. For better understanding, we have also included an example of Pixhawk (IMU) and ZED camera (stereo camera) calibration procedure.

CLion IDE

CLion (pronounced “sea lion”) is a cross-plateform IDE for C and C++ framework developed by JetBrains.

CMake and Other Build Systems

Programs written in compiled languages like C/C++ must be compiled before being run, a process which converts the high-level code written by the programmer into binary files that can be executed on a particular architecture. A build system is a framework that automates the process of compiling files in a...

Code Editors - Introduction to VS Code and Vim

This article will provide you with some basic features for both VS Code and Vim, and perhaps it helps you decide which to start with!

Computer Vision for Robotics- Practical Considerations

Things to take care of when working with vision in robotics:

Coverage Planner Implementation Guide

This wiki details how to implement a basic coverage planner, which can be used for generating paths such that a robot can cover a region with a sensor or end-effector.

Building Prototypes in CubePro

Cube Pro is a 3D printing alternative to the popular MakerBot Replicator Series. This is a step-by-step tutorial to using CubePro for developing prototypes and parts. CubePro is available to Carnegie Mellon University Students in Mechanical Engineering cluster.

Custom data-set for segmentation

Image segmentation can be useful in a lot of cases, for example, suppressing pedestrains, cars for your SLAM system so the extracted features belong to static scene only. This tutorial covers the procedure to create annotations for semantic segmentation task. This is useful when you want to outsource the labeling...

Delphi ESR Radar

DJI Drone Breakdown for Technical Projects

DJI is one of the best selling drone companies in the world. Considering also the fact that a DJI Matrice M100 costs $3500 and a M210 costs $12000, compared to a couple hundred dollars for most other manufacturers, it is obvious that they have some of the best drones in...

Outdoor UAV navigation (focus on DJI SDK)

While DJI has been developing great hardware and software to make relatively safe UAV technology commercially available and has made available an amazing SDK to help research and development, sometimes it becomes difficult to get details on their implementation as their documentation is pretty limited. This article will help a...

Docker for Pytorch

In this article we will go over the following: Creating a custom docker image for deep learning workflows Docker run command for starting the container

Docker and Windows Security

Docker is a popular tool for containerization, providing a lightweight and portable environment for applications to run in. One of the biggest advantages of using Docker is that it allows for consistent development and deployment across different environments. Developers can create an image of an application and run it anywhere...

Docker

Docker is a platform for developers and sysadmins to develop, deploy, and run applications with containers. The use of Linux containers to deploy applications is called containerization. Containers are not new, but their use for easily deploying applications is.

Drive-by-wire Conversion for Autonomous Vehicle

Drive by wire technology in the automotive or aviation industry is the use of electrical or electromechanical systems for performing vehicle functions traditionally achieved by mechanical linkages. This technology replaces the traditional mechanical control systems with electronic control systems using electromechanical actuators and human–machine interfaces such as pedal and steering...

Drone Flight Permissions

This article discusses the laws and regulations of flying small drones for the MRSD project. It details the process to fully certify your drone and obtaining flight permissions from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Furthermore, the article disucsses the rules for two registration categories. For...

How to use Eigen Geometry library for c++

The Eigen Geometry library is a C++ libary useful for robotics. It is capable of the following operations: Declare Vectors, matrices, quaternions. Perform operations like dot product, cross product, vector/matrix addition ,subtraction, multiplication. Convert from one form to another. For instance one can convert quaternion to affine pose...

Fabrication Considerations for 3D printing

There is more to 3D printing than designing components and parts and replicating those 3D solid models into useful assemblies. When beginning a design, one must take into account the 3D filament to use, the 3D printing equipment, the model’s final resolution and the limitations of each 3D CAD software...

Comparison of Fiducial Markers

Why is this comparison important? Different fiducial markers are best suited for different applications, so this article elucidates a brief list of pros and cons to evaluate different fiducial markers, enabling readers to choose a suitable one for one’s application.

Trajectory Planning in the Frenet Space

The Frenet frame (also called the moving trihedron or Frenet trihedron) along a curve is a moving (right-handed) coordinate system determined by the tangent line and curvature. The frame, which locally describes one point on a curve, changes orientation along the length of the curve.

Guassian Process and Gaussian Mixture Model

This document acts as a tutorial on Gaussian Process(GP), Gaussian Mixture Model, Expectation Maximization Algorithm. We recently ran into these approaches in our robotics project that having multiple robots to generate environment models with minimum number of samples.

Gazebo Simulation

This is a tutorial for Gazebo, including how to customize a model and use a sensor plug-in.

Git

Git is a distributed revision control and source code management system with an emphasis on speed. Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full version tracking capabilities, and is not dependent on network access or a central server. Git is free software distributed under the...

Externally Referenced State Estimation for GPS Lacking Environments

Robotic systems will often encounter environments where GPS access is either lacking or denied. In these environments, it’s important to still maintain some accurate global representation of the robot’s state, both for localization and mapping purposes. This is a relatively common problem in robotics, and is commonly dealt with through...

Using an RTK GPS

Introduction Position information can be critical for achieving high accuracy localization and one way to get this information is through the use of a GPS. It is possible to put a GPS only on the robot, but to get the centimeter level accuracy provided by RTK GPS systems a...

Workign with the Hello Robot Stretch RE1

The Stretch RE1 by Hello Robot, is a lightweight and capable mobile manipulator designed to work safely around people in home and office environments. It has 4 degrees of freedom - a telescoping arm which can reach 50cm horizontally, a prismatic lift which can reach 110cm vertically, a differential drive...

Husky Interfacing and Communication

This excerpt covers the basic methodologies to set up communication channels with the Clearpath Husky and make sure the hardware is receiving commands that are input by the user. The article will cover the hardware used for Husky’s onboard processing, additional hardware needed for better Localization and a brief description...

Contribute

Contribution Quickstart Guide The Robotics Knowledgebase is hosted on Github. You are welcome to edit and improve this project. You can find a link to the repository here.