Aerial Inspection Planners

This repo contains methods for 3D inspection using aerial vehicles.

Workspace setup

Pull this code into a ROS workspace. The directory structure should look something like inspection_ws/src/aerial_inspection_planners.

For example:

mkdir -p inspection_ws/src
cd inspection_ws/src
git clone <repo_address> (or copy the repo folder to here)

Using Docker

If you would like to build and run everything in Docker, follow the instructions in docker/notes.md. Otherwise, the stack was built using Ubuntu 22.04 with ROS Humble.

Building

Navigate to the workspace directory and run

colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

If using Docker, you may need to first source ROS2 with source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash.

Launching package

Source and launch the package with

source install/setup.bash
ros2 launch aerial_inspection_planner cpp_planner_launch.py

You should see an RViz window pop up and visualize the mesh, viewpoints, and the final plan.

Configuration

In RViz you can configure what you want to visualize. There are various mesh visualizations that show how many viewpoints can view each surface of the mesh. You can also visualize all of the sample viewpoints, how many mesh surfaces each viewpoint sees, and which viewpoints are selected for the final path.

You can find all of the planner parameters in config/cpp_planner.yaml.

The parameters include

• visualize_mesh: Boolean on if you want to publish the visualization messages. Default is true;
• mesh_name: The name of the mesh file to use. Expected to be located in the data/meshes folder.
• distance_from_surface: The distance from the surface for created viewpoints
• min_height: The minimum distance to the ground for the planned path.
• max_height: The maximium height of the planned path.
• min_distance: The minimum distance to a surface for a planned path.
• min_view_redundancy: The minimum number of views wanted for every surface.
• max_incidence_angle: The maximum incidence angle of a viewpoint to a surface for it to be counted as viewed.
• max_view_distance: The maximum distance of a viewpoint to a surface for it to be counted as viewed.
• camera_half_fov: The camera field of view divided by two.
• planner_type: Options are greedy (recommended) and iterative.
• tsp_method: Options are greedy, hc, sa, bnb, and ortools (recommended).
• tsp_solver_allowed_time: Allowed time for the tsp solver. Used by hc, sa, bnb, and ortools.
• rviz_scale: Scales the rviz visualizations.
• export_to_yaml: Boolean to export the final trajectory to yaml or not.

ROS2 Tips, Tricks, and Notes

Build options

colcon build --symlink-install --packages-select aerial_inspection_planner --event-handlers console_direct+
colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-args -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
colcon test
colcon test-results --verbose
ros2 run --prefix 'gdb -ex run --args' aerial_inspection_planner cpp_planner

Set just cpp_planner to debug

ros2 run aerial_inspection_planner cpp_planner --ros-args --log-level cpp_planner:=DEBUG

Sets all to debug, run one of the following

ros2 run aerial_inspection_planner cpp_planner --ros-args --log-level debug
ros2 launch aerial_inpsection_planner cpp_planner log_level:=debug

To build for debugging

colcon build --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

To modify the console outpute export RCUTILS_COLORIZED_OUTPUT=1

export RCUTILS_CONSOLE_OUTPUT_FORMAT="[{severity}] [{name}]: {message}"

export RCUTILS_CONSOLE_OUTPUT_FORMAT="[{severity}] [{time}] [{name}]: {message}"

export RCUTILS_CONSOLE_OUTPUT_FORMAT="[{severity} {time}] [{name}]: {message} ({function_name}() at {file_name}:{line_number})"

rosdep install -i --from-path src --rosdistro humble -y