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pythonc++raspberry-piros
coder.kalyan
coder.kalyan

Reputation: 23

Issues with ROS

My friends and I are building an autonomous plane (UAV) and are interested in using ROS for our software stack. However, I had a few problems with ROS and support, and am wondering if anyone knew any solutions?

Our plane currently houses a Raspberry Pi 3 (I might replace this with something with a better processor, but still an ARM SBC with the same GPIO). We will be running regular Raspbian (Lite). We plan to use a Navio2, which is an autopilot HAT that runs the open source ArduPilot firmware/software. We are going to use a mixture of C++ and Python.

My main issues at the moment are:

  1. Limited RPi support - Kinetic is the latest version that runs on RPi. Also very limited documentation for RPi.
  2. Doesn't really make use of even C++11, and I'd like to use the latest C++ features.
  3. OpenCV 4 recently came out, and I'd like to make use of it. Does ROS support any version of OpenCV or is it just 3?
  4. Doesn't use Python 3. This is a big thing for me, and using Python 2 isn't an option for various reasons.

I have also looked at ROS2, which aims to solve many of the problems listed above, but it didn't seem mature enough for us yet.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 415

Answers (1)

jhill515
jhill515

Reputation: 943

A few answers for your points:

  1. Melodic is supported on RPi 3 B+ now with Raspbian Lite. You might need to do a little apt-repo jockeying, but my team was able to get it without too much trouble.
  2. There's nothing stopping you from using C++17; just update your CMakeLists.txt files as appropriate to add -std=c++17 to the CXX_FLAGS
  3. To the best of my knowledge, ROS Melodic at release supports OpenCV3. It might take a little while for OpenCV4 support to be made available -- I still need to check on the project to get the latest news.
  4. I haven't actually looked at the Python3 support yet. I think its being deferred to ROS2.

That said, I wouldn't say that ROS2's immaturity is a good reason to disqualify it -- I know it's going to take a long while before there's enough support and all pre-existing ROS packages are ported to it (that's why my team didn't want to consider it).

In any case, I'd still consider if any of the algorithms you're planning on implementing really need OpenCV4 features, or if using that version is simply a "nice to have." OpenCV3 isn't really that old, and from what I can gather, handles everything state-of-the-art without making the algorithms bend too much to the API.

Update 28-Dec-2018

Doing some cursory searching, it looks like ROS Melodic does have Python3 support (see this question): ROS has to be built from source with the environment variable ROS_PYTHON_VERSION=3 set (see also this)

Upvotes: 0

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