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USC-ACTLab / crazyswarm

A Large Quadcopter Swarm
MIT License
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vicon connection issues and directory confusion #98

Closed pete9936 closed 6 years ago

pete9936 commented 6 years ago

Hi, I believe I have a connection issue between Vicon and crazyswarm. When I run hover_swarm I have not been able to see any cf on rviz. A similar concern was brought up in Issue #37 but I think something else may be occurring here.

I am successfully able to run the crazyflie_ros > crazyflie_demo files using the vicon_bridge that you outlined in your previous work. For this I am connecting to vicon over our remote network as opposed to locally with an ethernet connection but that shouldn't be an issue.

I also noticed in Issue #29 that some pieces with the vicon installation have maybe recently changed. I followed what was done there and downloaded DataStreamSDK 1.7 and placed it in the directory specified ros_ws/src/crazyflie_ros/externalDependencies/libmotioncapture/externalDependencies/vicon_sdk but had some confusion here. It seems that on this path you have already added vicon-datastream-sdk. The vicon_sdk structure I have is as follows: vicon_sdk_tree Where just a portion of the vicon-datastream-sdk that you have prebuilt is: vicon-datastream-sdk_tree I was wondering have you recently changed things and added all of this? I haven't seen anyone bring it up. Would it be alright to just delete the vicon-datastream-sdk that is preloaded and simply use my 'vicon_sdk' directory? Or are there may changes that would need to be made?

Following off that, I moved forward anyway and as you suggested in #37 I changed the hostname (vicon) to the IP address of our network when trying to run hover_swarm.launch by changing hostname in crazyswarm_server.cpp as follows: crazyswarm_server_cpp_ipsnip And also tried this for mocap_helper.launch by modifying mocap_helper.cpp as follows: mocap_helper_cpp_ipsnip And when I run this as detailed in the Configure Marker Arrangement section I get no output. Just to be thorough, while attempting to run hover_swarm.launch I chose to use motionCapture as the object_tracking_type and had "track" enabled for my objects cf1 and cf2 with the proper uri convention specified. And when I ran mocap_helper.launch I was ceratin to change the object_tracking_type to libobjecttracker and not to have "track" enabled on the Tracker software. I certainly tried with and without for both.

Am I going about this process correctly? And what could/should I change? And sorry for the long question, just wanted to be thorough.

whoenig commented 6 years ago

VICON recently published the SDK as open source, so there is no need anymore in manually putting the SDK (the readthedocs should reflect those changes).

For your IP address: You should change the address in the launch file and not in the code, i.e., https://github.com/USC-ACTLab/crazyswarm/blob/master/ros_ws/src/crazyswarm/launch/hover_swarm.launch#L43 or https://github.com/USC-ACTLab/crazyswarm/blob/master/ros_ws/src/crazyswarm/launch/mocap_helper.launch#L9. The other things (tracking mode) sound perfectly good to me.

Thanks for the detailed report and please let me know if it works when you specify the IP address in the launch file.

pete9936 commented 6 years ago

Thank you for getting back so quickly. Yes the process is very simple and straight forward now! The mocap_helper.launch works now that I changed the IP address in that file and I am streaming data from Vicon as expected.

However, I made the same modifications in hover_swarm.launch and I am getting an output error. I made the modification as you suggested: hover_swarm_ipchange But for some reason I get an error when I run roslaunch crazyswarm hover_swarm.launch hover_swarm_error I'm not sure if it's even associated with the Vicon changes. Rviz shows up but it is empty. For reference I am using Tracker 3.6 to track two crazyflies, cf1 and cf2. With uri:=radio://0/80/2M/E7E7E7E701 and uri:=radio://0/80/2M/E7E7E7E702. I have changed the allCrazyflies.yaml file accordingly and sourced the ros_ws into my .bashrc.

Any suggestions?

pete9936 commented 6 years ago

I went poking around other issues and I found that this has come up a couple of times. It looks like Issue #77 came across a similar vicon issue and solved it the same way. However, they also had the same process has died exit code -6 error as described above.

So I followed that thread which led to debugging using the technique of Issue #68 . This is where I'm now stuck. So I did the following like you said: $cd ros_ws $rm -rf build/ devel/ $catkin_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug And then updated the hover_swarm.launch file with the debugging launch prefix: hover_swarm_debug_launch_prefix Then in gdb I would run the node and then use the command bt to display the issue. However, I am unable to figure out what is wrong. Here is what I get from gdb: gdb_server_node_output

Any ideas moving forward? I think I'm officially stuck for now.

pete9936 commented 6 years ago

Well, I suppose it looks like the issue is at crazyswarm_server.cpp but I have left that completely untouched.

whoenig commented 6 years ago

The timeout exception means that the server couldn't connect to one or both CFs. Please double check the URIs and try to connect using the official client.

pete9936 commented 6 years ago

I looked back in the crazyflies.yaml file and my values were incorrect. Changed that and everything is working very nicely! I can successfully hover both of my Crazyflies!

Thanks so much for helping me out with this, and awesome work on the updated controller. The stability is really solid!

I will close this issue since all is well.

whoenig commented 6 years ago

Awesome, thanks for the update!

anikasaraf commented 9 months ago

I looked back in the crazyflies.yaml file and my values were incorrect. Changed that and everything is working very nicely! I can successfully hover both of my Crazyflies!

Thanks so much for helping me out with this, and awesome work on the updated controller. The stability is really solid!

I will close this issue since all is well.

How did you decide what values to put in your crazyflies.yaml