Visualisation for 3D Drawings, Cartographer, Global Planner

Autonomous Machines Robotics - Isaac Isaac SDK
1

Hi!

I am new to Isaac SDK and facing the following problems on visualisation on Sight on SDK version 2019.3. I appreciate if anyone can help me.

  1. I can’t seem to zoom in or shift views in 3D drawings around. I followed the instructions found on the documentation but it doesn’t work. Using mouse’s wheel just simply scrolls the entire Sight up and down.

  2. I am using Cartographer to perform LiDAR SLAM mapping. Is there anyway to view the merged submaps as mapping is being performed? Right now, I am viewing the map through 3D visualisation of submaps channel. With the problem highlighted in Point#1 and the lag of Sight, it becomes difficult to monitor the mapping process. I can only view the merged submap after I terminate the entire Isaac application and view the final merged map in /tmp/ folder.

I have tried to perform mapping real-time on Xavier but visualisation problem made it difficult to monitor the map. Personally, this is important during mapping process as I can monitor which map area needs correction and, hence, I can drive the robot around that particular area to collect more scan data to perform necessary correction.

  1. I am facing some problems in global planner. I used Carter example as my reference and used the entire navigation stack for differential drive robot. The map is attached. My robot has to pass through a small gap along a corridor and I am not sure why global planner is not able to plot a path through that gap. Instead, it plots a more inefficient path that takes a detour. I have adjusted the dimensions of the robot (shared robot model, differential base model and max_coliding_lookup). However, it did not seem to work. Is there anyway that I can view the costmap layer so that I can better understand why global planner is not able to plan a path through a gap?

Please advise. Thank you for your help!

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2

Hello Krittin,

Please see the answers below:

  1. Select the 3D plot window and while pressing the left button of the mouse, use WASDQE keys on the keyboard to manipulate the 3D plot.

  2. Merging submaps is quite heavy for performance thus we intentionally only merge them upon exit. Another reason is that submaps usually require manual alignment for better result.

  3. To visualize the cost map, enable the below channels in map view.

<your_app_name>/map/occupancy/distance_map
<your_app_name>/navigation.local_map.local_map/isaac.navigation.BinaryToDistanceMap/distance_map

If the channel name doesn’t match, in the “Channels” section of Sight search in the “filter” field for the keyword distance_map and it should give you relevant channels.

Also, for fine-tuning the navigation stack please have a look at this https://docs.nvidia.com/isaac/isaac/packages/navigation/doc/tuning.html#tuning-the-navigation-stack and this https://docs.nvidia.com/isaac/isaac/doc/faq.html#navigation-stack

Hope this helps!