Finally! Teleop!

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: