Rtabmap on drone

[Yuli]

Dear Mathieu,
I haven't done any survey and I am totally new to this,
so I wonder if you can guide me.
Now RTABMap and ZED+IMU are on the same
machine and  I intend to separate them;put ZED on TX2(totally new to me)
and pass images  to my laptop through WIFI. And hopefully in the end , put ZED and
TX2 on a drone with at least localization module(I heard it's too expensive to build a map)
so it can navigate itself in a given map.
(drone will connect with laptop with microhard)
1.Is this scenario possible?
2.What should I prepare with? I mean for the RTABMAP part?
What module should I be familiar with first?


Thank you!!


Sincerely,Ming

[Eric Schleicher]

Do you have a carrier board for the TX2?   (or a *very* large drone).   it's importants because if you use a carriers board it's possible that you will need to use a powered hub and supply it with regulated 5v in order to get the Zed to work correctly.  Most carrier boards don't output enough current to properly power the ZED.  

I'm using the Orbitty carrier board which *does not* run the ZED without external usb power (assistance).

where did you hear that it's too expensive to build a map on tx2?  I'm very curious about this.

[Yuli]

Dear Eric,
Thank you so much for your suggestions! I know
nothing about those hardware things. Anyway,
my department owns many type of drones,again, haven't
had a chance to understand them. I have been learning
rtabmap and ros and thinking if rtabmap can be applied on
collision avoidance and self-driving those kind of things,
but  I was often told that the computation of SLAM is too much for
tx2 on a drone so we can only expect to use rtabmap to build
a map first and try to localize our drone(one of our application is crack detection of a bridge).
I am more than willing to hear your advice in the future.


Ming

[matlabbe]

Hi Ming,

For the computation power required to run SLAM onboard, it depends at which frame rate you update the map (Rtabmap/DetectionRate), the number of features used for loop closure detection (Kp/MaxFeatures) and visual registration (Vis/MaxFeatures) and at which resolution you want to generate the maps (Grid/CellSize).

cheers,
Mathieu