Exploration and navigation performance

[alduxvm]

Hi all,

I was wondering if there is something we can do or tune to get better performance when doing exploration and navigation using pepper?

Right now, just a radius is used to make the exploration, and for places such as offices, anything more than 5 meters, it takes around 20 minutes and sometimes there is not too good results in the maps, take a look:

And then, the next day did another test and the map came out differently, a bit better:

My first question, do you think its possible to make an exploration while doing teleoperation of the robot? of course the documentation does not cover this topic, but if we do the motion in another thread and the exploring in another, would it be possible?

I also noticed that if we disable ALBasicAwareness the map gets slightly better because the head is not moving to much... is there a way to "lock" the head forward for exploration? even with the awareness_service.setEnabled(False) the head keeps yawing.

My second question is: what parameters or guidelines on the mapping location are the best for getting solid robust map results? (I know this cannot be super robust as in other robots, but I want to improve it)

For navigation, is there a way to increase the max speed of pepper? check this (https://i.imgur.com/MgfSXnu.mp4) video (timelapse), you can see how pepper "hesitates" a lot while doing the path planning and is not a smooth ride, pepper stops a lot...

You can see a video navigation here: https://i.imgur.com/MgfSXnu.mp4

Last question: Is there parameters we can tune/update for the mapping, navigation, path planning? Very similar to the ones of rtabmap or google cartographer?

Thanks a lot!

[scarlettfres]

Hi !
In wich version of naoqi are you? Because from naoqi 2.7, we add startMapping to make a map while controlling the robot:
http://doc.aldebaran.com/2-7/naoqi/motion/exploration-api.html#ALNavigationProxy::startMapping

You can disable ALAutonomousLife during your exploration to avoid undesired moves of the head with setState("disabled"):
http://doc.aldebaran.com/2-7/naoqi/interaction/autonomouslife-api.html#ALAutonomousLifeProxy::setState__ssCR

Hope it helps!

[alduxvm]

Hi!

My pepper is running: NAOqi version: 2.5.10.7, it updated recently... I was checking this link: https://community.ald.softbankrobotics.com/en/resources/software/language/en-gb and the only available is 2.5.5, how can I get naoqi 2.7?

Thanks a lot!