A robotic engineering uOttawa team focused on building a Mars Rover.

Beginning

I joined Mars Rover at the beginning of the project. I helped to give my opinion on software decisions based on my experience from Roboboat and helped to recruit new members to the team. I helped to set up the Gitlab repository with a working ROS workspace. I also helped with the creation/division of the initial software tasks. Unfortunately, I had to leave the team since I became co-captain (then later on captain) of the Roboboat team and needed to give more time to Roboboat.

Dashboard

With a decrease in participation in Roboboat and covid-19, I left Roboboat. A year after my departure, I wanted to do some robotics, so I joined Mars Rover again helping them with what Roboboat did in the past.

I built a ROS dashboard made in React using ROSLib.js at Roboboat and transferred it to be used by the Mars Rover team. It can connect to ROS image topics, see an overview of the ROS system (see sensors, topics, params, nodes, and services) and publish messages to topics according to the current mission. Here’s a demo of the dashboard (for a complete experience, you need to connect to the ROS system and view it in a new tab):

Navigation

Additionally, I helped with navigation with rtabmap. Since I was responsible for the vision part of Roboboat, I was already a bit familiar rtabmap. I helped them integrate the IMU sensor with the existing camera to get a better precision while mapping the environment, as the rover moves a lot, and created a ROS package encapsulating custom launch files.

CI/CD

I helped the Mars Rover team with a simple Gitlab CI pipeline to build the ROS package. It would check if the project has the dependencies correctly set up and if it is ROS packages are properly set up. Here’s a link to the pipeline.