joshi1983 / iarrcsim Goto Github PK

Robot Operating System is very popular for car controller projects in IARRC so if the simulator could act as a node in the robot operating system, it should be easier for most developers to use. It would be great if the simulator could fit into ROS without needing an ROS-specific dependency installed when it isn't used with ROS.

Answer the following questions:
What changes are needed if any and why?

What changes might we want and why?

For now, video camera frames are only retrievable in uncompressed bitmap format. PNG will be a nice option for reducing image data size and bandwidth. We don't want to remove the bitmap format option but take format as an extra parameter like how the format is specified when retrieving LIDAR data.

Similar to the other issue for PNG format, JPEG is another nice format for compression. JPEG is much better than the current uncompressed bitmap format for reducing data size and bandwidth.

Sometimes when the drone is dropped back onto the car, the drone's video window goes into a flickery loop between black and showing the car under it. Launching and dropping the drone several times should eventually lead to reproducing the bug.

Learn more about Gazebo. Some IARRC teams such as RoboJackets(https://github.com/RoboJackets/roboracing-software/) are using it to test their projects.

Some resources to get started with include:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcVjTKF_JYI
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4he7mPV41Xc

The web application hosted by the simulator was made in 2011 so many newer references should be added to it.

• The copyright year should be updated to 2016.
• Various links should be tested and broken links should be fixed/removed.
• A few recent videos about IARRC or related topics should be added to the website

The IARRC competition is occasionally done indoors. In the real challenge, this often presents new challenges for image processing as colours like orange, yellow, and red may be on walls. We have backdrops for St. Denis Centre and Thunderbird Stadium but want an indoor backdrop that includes some of the orange-like colours.

For now, if the config file, images, models... aren't there, the application crashes when loading. This makes it more difficult to see what's missing and get the initial development environment set up properly. Instead, the application should show an appropriate error message or messages in the terminal window and not cause any segmentation faults or crashes.