Autonomy

Code for Moon Ranger's autonomy computer lives here (in a ROS workspace)

The autonomy repository has the following components:

• Rover Executive
  • Decides what to do when. This components hosts the state machine which makes all the decisions.
• Global Planner
  • Keeps information in the global sense like the global map and generates plan on them. For example, given a goal generates a path which avoids craters and shadows.
• Navigator
  • Operates on the local frame, issues drive commands and navigates the robot avoiding non-traversable regions as the come up.
• Position Estimator
  • Estimates the position of the robot in both the local frame to be used by the navigator and global frame to reference the global map.
• Wifi Gateway
  • Main entry point to the autonomy computer. Talks to the wifi chip and transmits information back and forth including images and telemetry.
• Intercom
  • Similar to the wifi-gateway but talks to the embedded computer. Gets information like IMU and encoders and sends motor commands, state updates etc.
• Health Monitor
  • Monitors all the faults and reports to the executive. Generally does not take any actions execept restarting the executive when it is not active.
• Telemetry Manager
  • Responsible for packaging and sending telemetry information to the embedded computer and back to ground.
• Camera Driver
  • Controls the cameras and receives images from them.
• autonomy_common_msgs
  • ROS messages which are common between the different nodes live here. This is to make sure we do not run into circular dependencies.

Setup

• Clone the workspace using the clone command git clone https://github.com/PlanetaryRobotics/autonomy.git

• This should create the autonomy ROS workspace. To build, go to this directory and use catkin_make

cd autonomy
catkin_make

• To build the unit-tests use catkin_make with the following option

catkin_make --make-args tests

• To run the unit-tests use

catkin_make --make-args run_tests

I used the instructions on this page to setup the unit tests. Refer to that for more details.