Hi all,
I’m currently doing some development on a drone capable of doing GPS-denied navigation. My physical setup is a CUAV v5 with Jetson Nano connected over UART. Jetson is running jetpack 4.4 (which is basically just Ubuntu 18.04) with ROS Melodic and orb_slam2_ros node and monocular camera.
I’ve been testing the performance in SITL and want to make sure that my setup is correct before I move on to trying to optimise my fork of orb slam2. At the moment I have a downward facing ROS camera on the iris model and orb_slam is subscribing to this feed to do monocular slam. It is then publishing directly to mavros/vision_pose/pose. In effect this is really just visual odometry as I’m not using the map/pointcloud yet. The SLAM algorithm works well in that it is able to track quite consistently as the drone moves around in simulation.
When I switch off the GPS, PX4 switches over to vision mode. I use EKF2_AID_MASK = 321 as suggested here but the quality of the navigation quickly degrades until PX4 is forced to failsafe land.
I know that my monocular SLAM is not handling scale (this is the problem I’m about to tackle) but would you expect the local unscaled pose updates from a SLAM algorithm like this to benefit the EKF and PX4? Do you have any suggestions as places to start to check that co-ordinate frames, timing offsets etc are correct before I move on? Any help is much appreciated!