Driving Around
Now that you have set up your workspace and understand the various potential dangers of working with the Rover, let's power it on and drive a lap. Some software concepts will already get touched upon briefly, but the goal is to get comfortable with the hardware and tooling first.
Elias Groot
Software Lead, Course Organizer
Powering On your Rover
Every team has one or more Rover(s) designated to them throughout the project. All Rovers can be identified by their index: a number between 1-20 which you will find on the top plate of the Rover and its camera holder. Make sure you know the index of the Rover that you want to connect to before you continue.
Now put the Rover on its provided stand and make sure the wheels are not obstructed. Open the battery cage and slide in the battery. The connector cable should be at the left side. Put the battery door back to close the cage. The connector cables should stick out above the battery door. Extra force is not necessary to get the battery or battery door in place.
Plug in the battery connector into the board connector. As soon as the battery is connected, various green lights will turn on on the board and the motor calibration process will start. Do not touch or obstruct the wheels during calibration, which typically takes 8 to 10 seconds.
After calibration, always check the rear wheels by putting light force on them. The wheels should be in braking mode, trying to preserve their position continuously. If the rear wheels can spin freely, calibration failed and you should disconnect power immediately.
Check if you see the red status LED on the debix blink to indicate a successful boot. This usually takes around 15 seconds.
Connecting From Your Laptop
Launch roverctl and select the "connect" option. Enter the rover index and credentials you received. When connected to our ASE labs network, Rover indices should correspond to the 192.168.0.1<XX> IP range (e.g. Rover 3 is assigned IP 192.168.0.103). If this is not the case, you can specify a custom hostname or IP.
Enter all required information and hit "enter'. roverctl will perform a series of connection checks to make sure the Rover is correctly addressable. If all goes well, you can save the connection config, which will now become your active connection. Launch roverctl info to review some basic details about your Rover. You can find a list of all saved connections by launching roverctl and navigating to the "connections" page.
If you have multiple Rovers, you can initialize a new connection using roverctl connect or navigate to the "connections" tab. Only one connection can be active at a time, but many configs can be saved.
Starting (and Stopping) a Pipeline
Now, let's run the default autonomous driving pipeline authored by ASE. A pipeline is a collection of services, which are processes that communicate which each other. If you start any pipeline, all services will be started in parallel at the same time. For each service, its execution will be monitored and if a service stops or crashes (we call this a fault) all other services in the pipeline will be killed too. This prevents service execution in an invalid state, where one service waits for input from another, stopped, service which will never arrive. (We do not want the motors to block and continue spinning while waiting eternally for sensor data, that would just crash our Rover into the wall).
Use the track pieces in our lab to create a basic lap. Put the Rover on the track and open up roverctl. Navigate to the "pipeline" page and notice that three basic services have been configured for you. We will not discuss their internals now, but do you see how data flows from sensor input (imaging) to motors and servos (actuator)?
You can start and stop the pipeline by hitting s in the pipeline view. The first cold start might take a while, since all services need to be built first. After building, the services will be started and you should see the pipeline in the "running" state. Most importantly, you should see the Rover complete a lap on its own. Nice.
During pipeline execution, you can use your arrow keys to navigate the running services. Hit p to view basic service details, or l to read service logs. These logs are fetched from stdout and stderr, so they are a convenient first method of debugging. Hit q to go back to the pipeline overview.
Stop the pipeline by hitting s again. Now you've interacted with your Rover on a basic level, we will customize its behavior and gradually go more in depth. Although first, we will introduce some important concepts that you will see many times throughout these docs.