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

catkin_make --make-args tests

catkin_make --make-args run_tests

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