Hello all,
This will be a thread to track known issues in mmWave devices and projects. We will be updating this appropriately going forward.
Project: TI ROS Point Cloud Visualizer Lab (aka TI mmWave ROS Driver) Version 1.1
The affected lab is part of TI's mmWave Training Package versions 1.5.5 and 1.6.1
Problem Statement
The ROS Point Cloud Visualizer Lab fails to start with the recent ROS kinetic distribution (ros-kinetic-desktop-full) update from ros.org.
Symptom
The roslaunch command provided in TI mmWave ROS driver Setup Guide throws the following errors on the shell. A snapshot of the error is also attached.
[Error]: [<Timestamp>]: Skipped loading plugin with error: XML Document ‘<ros_workspace>/src/ti_mmwave_rospkg/mmWave_nodelets.xml’ has no Root Element. This likely means the XML is malformed or missing…
The error message continues on the shell and RVIZ starts-up but there is no point cloud displayed in the RVIZ window.
Finally, the following error is shown in the error log on the shell.
Failed to call service mmWaveCli.
Description
It appears that the ROS Kinetic distribution used by TI ROS Point Cloud Visualizer Lab was updated recently to have more error checking and it found an error in one of the XML files in TI’s ROS driver package. The error was always there in the XML file but it had no impact until now. The details of the file and the error are given below:
File: <ros_workspace>/ti_mmwave_rospkg/mmWave_nodelets.xml (The <ros_workspace> is usually ~/catkin_ws)
Error: The <depend> tag on line 14 is closed incorrectly as shown.
<depend>serial<depend/>
Fix
In the file ~/catkin_ws/src/ti_mmwave_rospkg/mmWave_nodelets.xml:
Change:
<depend>serial<depend/>
to:
<depend>serial</depend>
and restart the visualizer using the roslaunch command.
