IWR1443BOOST: Output intensity units

Andrew Redman

Intellectual 435 points

Part Number: IWR1443BOOST

I had a few questions about the mmWave ROS driver v1.2.

What units are used for the intensity output in the point cloud? I am getting returns of "40dB" off a corner cube at 2m. What is this power measured relative to?
According to the User Guide the PointCloud2 object should also be returning radial velocity, however I don't see that value. Is that going to be added in a future release?

Thanks,

over 7 years ago

0 Nitin Sakhuja over 7 years ago

TI__Mastermind 30405 points

Hi Andrew,

The ROS Visualizer demo uses the output data coming from the OOB Demo. The magnitude of the detected points in the OOB demo corresponds to the magnitude of the FFT peak. This is also discussed in the following post.

https://e2e.ti.com/support/sensor/mmwave_sensors/f/1023/p/622722/2295835#2295835

I'm looking into your question related to velocity and will provide a follow-up response soon.

Thanks

-Nitin

0 Nitin Sakhuja over 7 years ago in reply to Nitin Sakhuja

TI__Mastermind 30405 points

Hi Andrew,

The mmw OOB demo returns velocity for every detected point in the output structure, but it is not part of the ROS PointCloud output. The mmWaveDataHdl Nodelet sorts the incoming data over UART in the sortIncomingData thread.

The code for this thread is given in DataUARTHandler::sortIncomingData (file ~/catkin_ws/src/ti_mmwave_rospkg/src/DataHandlerClass.cpp). Look under the case READ_OBJ_STRUCT and you'll see that only the X, Y, Z and Intensity values are copied to the RScan->points structure.

Regards
-Nitin

0 Nitin Sakhuja over 7 years ago in reply to Nitin Sakhuja

TI__Mastermind 30405 points

Hi Andrew,

This is also mentioned in the lab release notes under the limitations section:

"Also, the Doppler field is not currently output in the ROS PointCloud2 Message."

Please mark this thread answered if your question is resolved.

Thanks

-Nitin

0 Andrew Redman over 7 years ago in reply to Nitin Sakhuja

Intellectual 435 points

Thank you Nitin. It was trivial to modify the code to place doppler values in for intensity values temporarily just to see what kind of data is being returned.

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IWR1443BOOST: Output intensity units