In June of 2019, Cruise announced their data visualization web application, Webviz, in a blog post entitled, “Webviz: An Open Source Platform for Robotics Data Visualization.” This follows previous announcements to open source Worldview, a library to translate the data-rich worlds our cars navigate into clear and intuitive 3D scenes, and rosbag.js, a JavaScript library […]
The purpose of this project was to develop a Machine Learning model to enable an RC car to autonomously navigate a race track using an Ouster OS1 lidar sensor as the primary sensor input. The model is an end-to-end Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that processes intensity image data from the lidar and outputs a steering […]
Previously, the process for training and deploying an ML model to autonomously operate an RC car was described in the post, “RC Car End-to-end ML Model Development.” The purpose of the project was to develop an ML model that predicted steering angles given a color camera image input to enable the RC car to follow a […]
This post describes the process of fusing the IMU and range data from an OS-1 lidar sensor in order to estimate the odometry of a moving vehicle. The position, orientation, and velocity estimates are critical to enabling high levels of automated behavior such as path planning and obstacle avoidance. One of the most fundamental methods […]
This post describes the process of integrating Ouster OS-1 lidar data with Google Cartographer to generate 2D and 3D maps of an environment. Cartographer is a system that provides real-time simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in 2D and 3D across multiple platforms and sensor configurations. SLAM algorithms combine data from various sensors (e.g. LIDAR, IMU, […]
Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications with containers that enables you to separate your applications from your infrastructure. Docker provides the ability to package and run an application in a loosely isolated environment called a container. The container provides a standardized environment for development. This means that we can distribute […]
This post details the process of integrating the Travis-CI tool with the Ouster ROS package. Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice where developers integrate code into a shared repository. Each integration can then be verified by an automated build and automated tests. This automated testing allows you to quickly detect errors and locate […]
In this post, we will adapt OSRF’s car_demo and citysim packages to simulate a Toyota Prius driving around a simulated city environment with an OS-1-64 lidar sensor. During ROSCon 2017, Ian Chen and Carlos Aguero gave a presentation entitled, “Vehicle and city simulation with Gazebo and ROS” (slides here). They developed a URDF model of […]
In this post, we will model and simulate an Ouster OS-1-64 in Gazebo, ROS’s simulation environment. Simulating the sensor in Gazebo allows users to experiment with the OS-1 sensor without needing to purchase the physical unit. Users can determine the ideal placement and orientation of the sensor for their specific application and evaluate the sensor’s […]