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[FAQ] mmWave: 360° Safety Bubble Lab for ROS is now available on the TI Resource Explorer

Other Parts Discussed in Thread: IWR6843ISK

360 Degree Safety Bubble with IWR6843ISK

The new lab 360° Safety Bubble for ROS has just been released on the TI Resource Explorer as part of the mmWave Industrial Toolbox 4.5.1. This lab leverages 4x IWR6843ISK EVMs to create a 360 degree safety bubble around the moving robot for human/obstacle presence detection and collision avoidance. This basically entails creating configurable warning (yellow) and danger (red) zones as shown below for slowing down and stopping the robot when a person/obstacle is detected within those zones in the safety bubble:

Some of the key capabilities/supported features of this lab have been captured below:

  1. 360 degree surround view for human/obstacle presence detection up to a max range of 10m - this range can be configured depending on customer requirement.
  2. Configurable 2m slow down zone allows robot to start slowing down (early collision avoidance warning) when a human/obstacle is detected anywhere within a 2m radius around the robot.
  3. Configurable 1m stop zone allows robot to stop when a human/obstacle is detected anywhere within a 1m radius around the robot.

For more details on this lab, please see the Frequently Asked Questions below or refer to the Lab user’s guide.

  • Frequently Asked Questions

    What resources are available to get familiar with the Industrial mmWave Sensor?
    –Please start with the Out of Box Demo for IWR6843ISK ES2.0 on https://dev.ti.com/tirex/
    How can I increase detection range to 15m?
    –Change ‘filter_limit_max’ to 15 for all ‘x_filt_out_*’ filters in the following file: <catkin_ws>/src/turtlebot_mmwave_launchers/launch/radar_limit_filters_bubble.launch.
    –Change the ‘obstacle_range’ parameter to 15 in file ‘costmap_common_params.yaml’ after calling ‘roscd turtlebot_navigation/param/’.
    How can I configure the stop zone radius to 1.5m and slow zone radius to 5m?
    –Change the parameters ‘slow_radius’ to 5 and ‘stop_radius’ to 1.5 in ‘controller.launch’ in folder <catkin_ws>/src/ti_safety_bubble/launch/.
     
    I have to tilt my south sensor upwards by 10 degrees, how can I account for this tilt in ROS?
    –Change the pitch (5th) parameter to -0.175 in the static transform in each ‘bubble_sensor_<compass_direction>.launch’ file. More parameters for the static transform are described here: http://wiki.ros.org/tf#static_transform_publisher
    What does each color point cloud represent?
    –Each color represents what each sensor is viewing. Specifically, points seen by the north sensor are purple, east sensor is red, south sensor is blue, and west sensor is orange.
    I would like to see a point cloud only visualization. How can I do this?
    –To show only the point cloud data, on the remote machine, in a new terminal, execute ‘rosrun rviz rviz -d <catkin_ws>/src/turtlebot_mmwave_launchers/launch/bubble_visualization_2.rviz’
    Why is the previous location of an object being tracked in the costmap?
    –Nonmoving and moving objects are both viewed as the same type of obstacle in the costmap. It is necessary to maintain the history of moving objects so that the controller can handle static objects as well. Classifying the objects as either nonmoving or moving would eliminate this limitation.

    Safety Bubble Troubleshooting

    Errors when connecting to IWR6843ISK:
    –Use the command ‘roslaunch ti_mmwave_rospkg bubble_sensor_north.launch config:=3d device:=6843ISK’ to see if at least the north sensor is working.
    –Kill the process with ‘Ctrl+C’ and use the same command again but replace ‘bubble_sensor_north.launch’ with ‘bubble_sensor_south.launch’, ‘bubble_sensor_west.launch’, and ‘bubble_sensor_east.launch’. Killing the process after each successful launch. Do not continue until all launch files run successfully.
    –Then run the rest of the demo as described in the User’s Guide.