Justin Poh
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    • Course Projects >
      • Mechanical Engineering/Material Science >
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Finally! Teleop!

2/11/2016

 
Yesterday was a major milestone achievement for us! We have working ROS-LabVIEW teleop on the vehicle! We managed to do 2 rounds of Lot D at Olin and then teleop-ed the vehicle back to the large project building, all without needing to do much manual driving, which was fantastic.

We essentially used a stock keyboard teleop ROS package in ROS and then added while loops in labview to take those commands and use them in a way that made sense for the vehicle. As a result, using the standard keyboard teleop package, forward and backward controls increase or decrease the speed and left and right turns increase or decrease the turning radius as appropriate. 

Several things we learned from that test:
  1. Keyboard teleop using our current control scheme works pretty well. Setting desired speeds and headings and using the keyboard to increment or decrement them is pretty intuitive to use.
  2. The steering wheel isn't turning fast enough to make the teleop process effortless. The motor voltage is also being limited in software far below it's maximum rating so we have some room to turn up the motor voltage to get it to turn faster. However, we will have to also adjust the PID constants accordingly.
  3. The gas pedal PID control was inconvenient before but it is awful in teleop because the pedal motion is so jerky. So, our first pass will be to try to turn up the integral gain to eliminate the jerkiness and see what that gets us.
  4. There's a strange networking bug between LabVIEW and ROS that's causing LabVIEW to reset its drive commands to zero. Not sure why that's happening.

So, there's some work for us to do but at least we've got something mostly working! Here's a video to prove it:

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    Gator Research Blog

    Welcome to the Gator Research Blog for the Sprint 2016 semester! The aim of this research will be to develop the software to enable drive-by-wire on a John Deere Gator and to begin developing a system for generating depth-registered images.  Follow our progress here!
Last Updated: 13th May 2022
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Publications
  • Resume
  • Undergrad Work
    • Course Projects >
      • Mechanical Engineering/Material Science >
        • Design Nature, Fall 2012
        • Transport Phenomena, Fall 2014
        • Mechanical Design, Fall 2014
        • MechSolids, Spring 2014
        • Dynamics, Fall 2013
      • Robotics >
        • Principles of Engineering, Fall 2013
        • Fundamentals of Robotics, Fall 2014
      • Product Design & Development >
        • NEADS System Design, Fall 2015
        • UOCD, Spring 2014
        • Engineering for Humanity, Spring 2013
      • Electrical/Software Engineering >
        • Software Design, Fall 2013
        • Real World Measurements, Spring 2013
        • Modeling & Control, Fall 2012
      • Data Science & Analysis >
        • Analyzing Gait Data, Spring 2015
        • Crowd Flow Modeling, Spring 2015
    • Undergrad Research >
      • Gator Research, Spring 2016
      • Gator Research, Fall 2015
      • Robotic Tuna Research, Fall 2014
      • Robotic Tuna Research, Summer 2014
    • Phoenix Racing