Erstling: Solving Cospace Rescue with ROS and computer vision

Why is it called Erstling?

Based on the FuG 25a Erstling Friend or Foe Detection Radar System the system was brilliant but over engineerd. and this is sort of the theme of this project Solving a trivial Game meant to teach kids programming with cutting edge robotics techniques and tools

Reading Material

• Rulebook
• all vars explained

Tasks!

• Odom_publisher

  • sub to /cospace_state and integerate over WheelSpeedLeft and WheelSpeedRight to figure out our position and orientation
  • hint: use eular angles and compass then convert to quats. and pixels per second

• object_markers (take video from the arena and convert it to useful markers)

  • write the actual ROS Code

    • write the frame reading from cospace_state code
    • write the Marker Publisher code
    • Write the frame_viz Publisher code

  • check object_markers/notebooks/playground.ipynb for details about tasks and the actual Computer Vision Code

  • V2 (better score)

    • detect super objects
    • detect swaps
    • detect speical zones

• Nav Package

  • Must be able to teleport
    • when to teleport? idk read the rules
  • use the CS to pick points
    • and do the dance in
  • use US to avoid obsticals

Installation

• install WSL 1 on your windows machine
• install MS robotics dev studio 4
• install cospace rescue
• download ffmpeg and unzip it in a directory
• set that dir to ffmpeg_path in cospace2ros/launch/cospace_ctrl.launch
• create a dir in your perfrred location and put it's location in ```comms_dir in cospace2ros/launch/cospace_ctrl.launch``
• change the locations of the files read and written to in cospace2ros/cospace_project_files/ai.c (lines:163 and 176) to ones that point to comms_dir
• Upload the ai.c file to the Cospace Rescue Robot
• create a catkin_ws with the project files inside src dir. (not src/erstling/cospace2ros, but src/cospace2ros)
• copy the .git dir from erstling repo into the src dir in the catkin_ws (makes working and tracking changes easier)
• run catkin_make . then catkin_make install
• roslaunch catkin_ws/src/erstling/launch/nuke.launch (Todo)

Troubleshooting / Notes

• if the Entire cospace program quits after starting the game that means that ai.c can't read/write the control files
• thanks to https://github.com/aler9/rtsp-simple-server for stream-server