Height above ground level - sensor

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Original report (archived issue) by Anonymous.

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Is it possible for you to add a sensor to measure height above ground of the vehicles? It think this would benefit all the teams.

Thanks,
Hector.

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Original comment by Nate Koenig (Bitbucket: Nathan Koenig).

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Do you mean a downward facing lidar beam that would return the distance from the vehicle to the ground? If so, we can take that into consideration.

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Original comment by Steve Peters (Bitbucket: Steven Peters).

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Another option is an AltimeterSensor, which gazebo supports.

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Original comment by Nate Koenig (Bitbucket: Nathan Koenig).

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I think the altimeter sensor returns the vertical position relative to a reference frame. So, the altimeter sensor wouldn't be able to detect changes in the terrain below a quadcopter that is flying at a fixed height.

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Original comment by Steve Peters (Bitbucket: Steven Peters).

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Yeah, they are measuring different things. I think an altimeter would be more useful for one of the ground vehicles as it travels up and down in the tunnels, but the downward facing lidar would be more helpful for a drone.

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Original comment by Hector Escobar (Bitbucket: hector_escobar).

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Yes, I mean a downward facing lidar for the quadcopters. Thanks!

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Original comment by Neil Johnson (Bitbucket: realdealneil1980).

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Has there been any movement on this? If we develop such a sensor and submit it as an enhancement, would that help? I don't know if such a sensor exists in gazebo, but it would be very beneficial. Does a point laser exist (as opposed to a line scanning laser)? That would be sufficient...

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Original comment by Neil Johnson (Bitbucket: realdealneil1980).

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There is a sonar sensor in the hector gazebo plugins...can we add such a sensor to our vehicle?

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Original comment by Neil Johnson (Bitbucket: realdealneil1980).

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We have added the hector quadrotor sonar to the X4_with_sensors.xacro file. We have added it as a downward facing sonar, and we've also added an upward facing lidar. We chose limits that seem reasonable relative to the real world. We are happy to share this with the entire user community. We would like to start using this sensor to support our solution to the subt challenge. Please let us know if this is ok or if we need to seek approval from DARPA.

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Original comment by Angela Maio (Bitbucket: Angela Maio).

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• changed state from "new" to "resolved"

Upward and downward range sensing were incorporated using point lidar sensors in X4_SENSOR_CONFIG_6, SSCI_X4_SENSOR_CONFIG_1 and SSCI_X4_SENSOR_CONFIG_2.