ROS MiniImu Calibration and Sensor Fusion

Overview

This is a ROS package developed to calibrate and fuse the orientation data provided by an Polulu MiniImu v9.

The ROS MiniImu Calibration and Sensor Fusion Packages are tested under ROS Indigo and Ubuntu 14.04.

Affiliation: Advancements for Robotics in Rescue Applications, AR2A

Travis Build Status

Build Status

Installation

Dependencies

This software is built on the Robotic Operating System (ROS), which needs to be installed first. Additionaly, the ROS MiniImu Calibration and Sensor Fusion depends on following software:

  • arduino toolchain (simple programming environment for education pcbs)

  • rosserial (wrapper to transmit ros messages over a serial port)

      sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-rosserial-arduino
  sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-rosserial

  • Boost (general purpose c++ library),

      sudo apt-get install libboost-dev

  • armadillo (c++ linear algebra library),

      sudo apt-get install liblapack-dev
  sudo apt-get install libblas-dev
  sudo apt-get install libarmadillo-dev

Building

To use the packages in your project, clone the latest version of this repository to the source folder of your catkin workspace. Make sure that all dependencies listed above are installed before executing catkin_make.

    cd ~/catkin_ws/src
    git clone https://github.com/AR2A/imu-minimu-arduino.git
    cd ..
    catkin_make

Basic Usage

Downloading the firmware to the arduino

In order for the download to work modify the file “avr_imu/firmware/CMakeLists.txt” to suit your setup.

    cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8.3)
    
    include_directories(ros_lib arduino_libs)
    
    generate_arduino_firmware(avr_imu
    	SRCS avr_imu.cpp arduino_libs/L3G/L3G.cpp arduino_libs/LSM303/LSM303.cpp ros_lib/time.cpp
    	BOARD mega2560
    	PORT /dev/ttyACM0
    )

Most likely the variables BOARD and PORT have to be modified.

Afterwards you download the firmware by issuing the following commands inside your catkin workspace.

    catkin_make avr_imu_firmware_avr_imu
    catkin_make avr_imu_firmware_avr_imu-upload

Visualizing data with rviz

For debugging purposes it can be useful to visualize the orientation within rviz. To do so install the imu_tools package which contains the rviz_imu_plugin package.

    sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-imu-tools

Nodes

Node: avr_imu

This is the rosserial node running on the arduino board. The node reads the data from the imu over the spi interface and issues a message containing this data in a 50 Hz cycle.

Subscribed Topics

None

Published Topics

Services

None

Parameters

None

Node: calib_imu(experimental)

This node executes a step by step calibration process to compensate the alignement and scaling of the imu data (as well as hard and soft ironing effects on the magnetometer data). When the calibration finishes the calculated data is stored inside the ros execution path (typical ~/.ros).

Subscribed Topics

Published Topics

None

Services

None

Parameters

None

Node: process_imu_data

This node processes the senor fusion with an extended kalman filter

The node is roughly designed after the findings of the following paper:

David Jurman, Marko Jankovec, Roman Kamnik, Marko Topic, “Calibration and data fusion solution for the miniature attitude and heading reference system”, in Sensors and Actuators A: Physical, Volume 138, 2007.

Subscribed Topics

Published Topics

Services

None

Parameters

None

Bugs & Feature Requests

Please report bugs and request features using the Issue Tracker.