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2016-07-16 02:06:38 -0500 commented answer Robot distance/angle positioning with sensors

Hello, thank you very much for your suggestion. Anyway what I noticed is that the black metal surface is almost invisibile even if placed at 1.5mt of distance (...i know it seems really strange, but it doesn't happen with a white wall for example!). I will send you rviz screen capture!

2016-07-16 00:45:40 -0500 asked a question Robot distance/angle positioning with sensors

Hello guys,

In my project - which I successfully simulated with Gazebo ROS my robots needs to position itself exactly in perpendicular position to a metallic surface - specifically 3 meters from the side-door of a car so that the front of the robot points the same direction of the car.

I successfully solved the issue in Gazebo ROS using a lidar sensor.

image description

The algorithm works the following way. I calculated the distance/angle from the target surface using 3 different scan ranges from the lidar output. Using a few trigonometric functions I was able to calculate the angle correction that had to be applied to the robot base_link to be perfectly perpendicular to the target.

So everything is perfect in simulation!

image description

The pain now comes in the real world...

I tested my align-base function in real world using a RPLidar (robot peak lidar). I noticed that the lidar scan output on a black metal surface is very unreliable. Consider that black and metal is very common on a car body (I didn't test on other colors yet)

Now my question is: did I use the wrong type of sensor for this sort of application - or there's any work around you can suggest to solve the issue?

Can't wait to hear your opinions!

Thanks!