The Michigan WolvMarine, Michigan's Maritime RobotX Team

This is the central code repository for the Michigan Maritime RobotX team and the WolvMarine. The current setup utilizes ROS Kinetic and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Contents

The contents of this repository are as follows:

• deploy/ contains instructions and scripts for field deployment of the WolvMarine.
• setup/ contains instructions and scripts for setting up the WolvMarine and its constituent parts. This includes setting up the remote as base computers, Arduino boards, network devices, etc.
• wolvmarine_ws/ is the catkin workspace for the WolvMarine and contains its ROS packages.

Field deployment

TBD

Action items

Each of the contained folders details more specific action items. The following are larger considerations given lessons learned from the past competition.

• Develop field deployment scripts and documentation.

• Consider moving the INS sensor. For navigation, it is important that the center of the robot is placed at the rotational center of the robot. To reduce excessive movement noise, the INS should be placed the base_link be paced at the center of floatation?

• Robust remote control solution.

  The current setup utilizes an Xbox-style controller whose inputs are funneled through the base computer to the remote computer and the to the Arduino acting as a motor controller. The communication occurs via a TCP socket, which sacrifices speed to prioritize completeness. In addition, joystick commands are posted to a ROS topic, but only as the commands change. This causes issues when packets are lost.

  During the competition, wireless networks, bandwidths, and center fequencies were not controlled by the competition's leadership. As such, wireless communication became a battle of who has the highest powered base-station antenna. Our performance suffered due to these network issues given that our remote control setup was using TCP.

  Two immediate solutions would be (1) to implement a UDP socket for sending remote control commands, or (2) have

• Adopt the taxonomy of remote and base computers, rather than referring to them by puget and dell.

• Adopt the platform name of WolvMarine in the documentation, rather than referring to it as the WAM-V.

• Setup auto-generation documentation software, such as sphinx. This would allow us to comment only once, in the code. For example, each of the developed ROS nodes may accept a set of parameters. The documentation for these parameters should be given in file that initializes the node, rather than including definitions in separate parameter files.

• Parameter files should be avoided from now on. In some cases, they make sense, but in most others, it is clearer to use the rosparam tag when spinning up a node in a launch file.

• It may be better to consolidate the descriptions and action items from the multiple README's.