ELP Stereo Camera ROS Package

I created a ROS driver for the ELP-1MP2CAM001 Dual Lens stereo camera while working on some underwater point-cloud applications. Included in the package is: a URDF macro for the camera a usable calibration udev rules to reliably access the two cameras a launch file to start two usb_cam nodes and a stereo_image_proc node a launch file to start the calibration process Links Source: https://github.com/joshvillbrandt/elp-stereo-camera-ros-pkg Documentation: http://wiki.ros.org/elp_stereo_camera

Mecanumbot Hector SLAM

I finally set some time aside to build some maps of my apartment using a SLAM algorithm! I ended up using the hector_slam package in ROS to do the job. There was a lot of trial and error involved in tuning my odometry and the hector_slam algorithm, but it eventually worked just fine. Check out the screenshots below! Links Mecanumbot ROS package

Mecanumbot Ball Following

I have updated my Mecanumbot code to the latest and greatest ROS distribution – Hydro. During the upgrade, I wrote a companion app to publish velocity commands based of of the output of my ball tracker. The result is that the Mecanumbot can follow a red ball around the room! I wrote the ball tracking code itself back in college. The segmentation approach is pretty naive, but I only spent…

Quick Manual Control Demo

This weekend I added a wireless Xbox controller to the list of devices I can use to control the Mecanumbot. Before now I’ve been able to use a standard RC transmitter, a computer keyboard, and a Wiimote. I again used the ROS framework to integrate the controller. Built into ROS is a joystick node to interface with the wireless USB dongle and I had already built a node to listen…

Identify Duplos ROS Package

The goal of this project is to “count the Duplos on the table.” The tools available include a point cloud-­‐producing sensor (the Kinect), ROS, the Robotic Operating system from Willow Garage, and PCL, the Point Cloud library. An end goal for this project is to provide some usual information to another agent such as a robotic arm motion planner. The information provided could help the motion planner manipulate LEGO Duplos.…