This is a port of the Apollo GNSS driver to pure ROS. We removed dependencies on the protocol buffer messaging infrastructure used by Apollo.
This driver has been tested to work with a Novatel ProPak 6 on the University of Nevada, Reno's MKZ platform from AutonomouStuff.
This work was supported by the Nevada Governor's Office of Economic Development and the State of Nevada's Knowledge Fund.
- Integrate Apollo's framework into the ROS framework through remove of protocol buffer dependencies for messages and instead use the ROS message framework to publish and subscribe to sensor topics.
- Publish, subscribe, and log gnss data including gps, imu, ins, and wheel encoder.
- Stream RTK correction to the GPS receiver if available.
This GNSS driver has two nodelets: a data stream nodelet and a parser nodelet. The stream nodelet communicates between the host PC and the device and grabs the RTK data from a NTRIP caster. The parser nodelet subscribes the raw data from the stream nodelet, parses the data, and publishes ROS messages.
- GPS data, e.g. velocity latency, position and velocity and their standard deviations
- INS data, e.g. position, linear and angular velocity and covariance
- IMU pose data, e.g. orientation, velocity, & acceleration
- data stream status
- gnss status
- ins status
- imu data
- localization data
We use protocol buffers to store the driver configuration. The configuration file is stored in path share/gnss_driver/conf/ which is quoted by gnss_driver.launch. File gnss_driver.launch is stored in path share/gnss_driver/launch/.
When using the gnss_driver, the following should be checked before deployment:
- To use the location with UTM projection, check the zone id configuration in gnss_driver.launch.
- Check the the lever arm distance.
- Confirm the imu install method, as this affects the vehicle's frame and orientation compute.