Intro If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you might have seen my earlier blog posts summarizing my experience as a Remote Robotics Consultant. In case you’d like to start from the beginning, here is the ordered list: One Year of Working as a Robotics Consultant Thoughts on 2 Years as a Remote Robotics Consultant Remote Robotics Consulting - 3.5 Years In In this blog post, I will highlight some of the updates since my last blog and offer some advice that I hope will be useful for anyone looking to get into technical consulting. Strap in, and let’s go! Update on my Previous Blog Post ..read more

Earlier this year, I made a beginner’s course Build Mobile Robots with ROS2, that focuses on mobile robots. This blog post describes my experience and thought process when designing it. Introduction I used ROS for my Master’s Thesis (A 3D Mapping Payload for UAV Applications) in 2013. Then, I started working full-time with it around 2016 and never stopped. My main focus was always on applications using drones and mobile robots, so covering mobile robotics was a natural fit for the whole project series. Why did I switch from calling it a course to calling it a project? Manning LiveProjects are ..read more

While preparing my ROS2 course on mobile robots I was not able to find quality information about basic sensors that can be used for mobile robots and the most important considerations on using them. In this short blog post, I’ll discuss some of the issues I have come across while using IMUs and LiDARs in tens of robotics projects. IMUs If you are working in mobile robotics it’s pretty much given that you will use an IMU on your robot. Over the years I’ve worked with multiple sensors such as: MPU6050 Bosch BNO055 PhidgetSpatial Precision Xsens MTi-630-DK - last used for my blog post on 3D Mapp ..read more

This is the third blog post in the series of posts summing up my experience working as a Robotics Consultant. My recent realisation is that I’ve been consulting for half my career now, so hopefully some of the things I’ve learnt along the way will help someone else out there. Previous Blog Posts If this update is your entry point to my reflections on working as a remote Robotics Consultant, then you might want to start with my previous blog posts: 1 Year In, 2 Years In. I’ll do my best not to talk about the same things, but instead focus on the things that have either changed or that I’ve deve ..read more

In my previous post I’ve shared some of my experience working with Septentrio Mosaic X-5 dev kits. After seeing some good results with that hardware I’ve decided to try to use them with some other hardware to realise a prototype that I had in mind for quite some years. In this post I’m going to describe what I did to get a first prototype working and share some tips for anyone who would like to replicate them. The idea I’ve been interested in developing a proof of concept system for mapping (either using SLAM or other methods) for at least 7 years now (it might be slightly related to the fact ..read more

Quite a while ago I’ve received two units of mosaic development kits from Septentrio. This blog posts sums up my experience with it and provides some insights into integrating these with ROS. First impressions The first thing that you notice when unpacking the module is the size of the carrier board at 10x16 cm it’s quite large, however, the core module is only 7x5 cm. I don’t think I’ve ever used a positioning system that would be that simple to set up. This video that is less than 2 minutes explains the basics on how to connect to the module. The gist of it is you connect the receiver antenn ..read more

It’s that time of year again when I’m thinking back on the journey I set up for myself by deciding to go into Robotics Consulting. This article is a follow up to the blog post I wrote last year. This year, I’ve decided to try and cover the most important aspects of what I’m doing, and how it has been working out for me. The work I had I’m very grateful for the kind of work that I do - it feels amazing doing what I love and getting paid for it. I would never change my work for anything else. Every single one of my clients has an interesting problem to solve, and I’m yet to get my first negative ..read more

Recently I’ve started integrating Ouster OS1-16 on a client’s platform and he was nice enough to allow me to run some tests with this LiDAR sensor. This post describes my first impression with this unit and provides some pointers that can be useful for anyone looking into using Ouster sensors with Robot Operating System. Hardware Parameter Value Range 0.25-120m (at 80% reflectivity) Range resolution 0.3 cm Horizontal FoV 360° Vertical FoV 33.2° Rotation frequency 10 or 20Hz Laser wavelength 865nm Operating power 14-20W Operating voltage 24V Interface Gigabit Ethernet (UD ..read more

I believe that in everyone’s life there comes a time where they need to do what they’ve always feared: they need to compile a Unix Kernel. This post is a step by step guide how I enabled the PPS support on Jetson Nano. Background For one of the projects I’m working on we wanted to have as precise timing information as it gets on a Linux board. In this particular project I opted on using gpsd together with PPS for driving the clock of Jetson Nano. During the research I’ve found a couple of dead ends and therefore I decided that I’d describe the process that I’ve followed in case anyone finds it ..read more

Together with Robosynthesis we’ve been working on developing and integrating a 360 camera module for our ROS based industrial inspection robots. I was so pleased with the results that I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to share what we’ve been up to. Background In one of the projects we have worked on we run into an issue - teleoperating a robot in an environment filled with obstacles was really difficult with the cameras we had at the time. In that particular project we ended up with the following camera setup: One camera was pointed forward Two cameras were pointing to the sides Fourth came ..read more