Does ros_arduino_bridge support a gyro or imu?

asked 2013-07-31 19:52:43 -0600

dan
855 ●52 ●62 ●76 http://www.fellowrobots.com/

I am using ros_arduino_bridge to operate an arduino-based robot and it works well both for odometry and motor driving. However, I want to add a gyro to enable better calibration and also to then have the functionality of a turtlebot. Then it is easy to add additional sensors such as a kinect.

I know that I could write stand-alone routines to feed the gyro data directly, but it is a hurdle to get a sufficient understanding of nav msgs and figure out the details of how to correctly publish that data. Since ros_arduino_bridge does such a nice job with wheel odometry, I am hoping that there is a way to incorporate gyro data.

answered 2013-08-02 03:38:35 -0600

Pi Robot
4046 ●134 ●158 ●192 http://www.pirobot.org/

Hi @dan - it shouldn't be that hard to add gyro support but (as the author of the ros_arduino_bridge package), I don't have the time to do it myself right now. Anyone else is welcome to fork the repo and give it whirl. A good place to start might be the Turtlebot code.

FWIW, I do not use a gyro on Pi Robot and I am able to do SLAM and AMCL just fine using wheel odometry alone, albeit with a laser scanner. If I remember correctly, the original reason to put a gyro on the Create-based TurtleBot was because the wheel odometry was rather unreliable, especially when turning.

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Thanks for the timely response. I have found that a gyro makes a huge improvement for turning accuracy over wheel odometry, so would really like to incorporate that data. I tried to add gyro support in the way that Turtlebot does, but got bogged down with the details of /imu/data and imu/raw.

dan ( 2013-08-02 06:39:44 -0600 )edit

I spent many hours going through the nav tutorials and trying to pick apart the Turtlebot code but ultimately failed. I bought the book ROS by Example, which is excellent, but was disappointed that even that book does not cover using a gyro.

dan ( 2013-08-02 06:40:40 -0600 )edit

I see from ros.answers that a lot of people have the same problem trying to get gyro data into a non-create-based version of Turtlebot.

dan ( 2013-08-02 06:41:26 -0600 )edit

I could publish the gyro data as the theta component of /odom, that seems straightforward, but I don't know if that will allow me access to the good nav features of Turtlebot, since it means I have to use the "no gyro present" option. Do you think that would work??

dan ( 2013-08-02 06:41:52 -0600 )edit

These were actually just one comment, but had to be broken up due to character limits.

dan ( 2013-08-02 06:42:32 -0600 )edit

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