Monday, August 14, 2017

ROS Autonomous Bot - Clerkbot - WiFi Teleop

It's almost been 2-3 months since I last posted about Clerkbot. This is largely due to my moving to Bangalore and new job is really hectic as a Data Scientist. I had some of the videos remaining to be posted and hence this post. I was facing a lot of issues with setting up a fully functional WiFi operable Clerkbot setup.
One of the reasons for this was the power setup for the whole system. I was running a WiFi router, two motors sucking almost 1 Amps each and not to forget the NVIDIA Jetson TK1 board that was also running the RPLIDAR A2 on a 12 V 2200 LiPo mAH battery. One big mistake I did was not balancing the LiPo battery as unbalanced cells tend to create a P.D among themselves and what you get as an output is not sufficient amperage to power the whole setup. I guess this is the best possible explanation for the weak power output I was getting, but then I can be wrong. I was using an externally powered USB 2.0 extension adapter(via Powerbank) on the NVIDIA to power the RPLIDAR but with no help. This was causing a weird delay on the messages sent from base Ubuntu ROS station to the bot. Again, I tried using the 3.0 USB adapter, but was underpowered from the Jetson TK1 board. The delay went away but then 500 mA is not enough to power a 3.0 USB adapter and hence the bot didn't respond after about a minute. Here's a look at the setup:




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