2023-12-21 Racing Working Group Meeting

[pojenwang]

Administrative

Previous Meeting Minutes

Attendees

• Po-Jen Wang (AWF)
• Mitsudome-san (Tier.IV)
• Jack Silberman (UCSD)

Minutes: Po-Jen Wang

Topics

Autoware on Jetson Orin JetPack6

• JetPack 6 was recently released by NVIDIA. It finally supports Ubuntu 22.04 and ROS2 Humble which is the default Autoware environment
• We began installing Autoware (main branch) on a Jetson Orin Nano with JetPack 6 (flashed with SDK manager method). This Jetson can be integrated on a F1tenth car or gokart
• Took about 6-7 hours to install and did not encounter major problems compared to running on 20.04 and ROS2 galactic.
• Still needed to create a swap file to prevent insufficient memory, even with the 4GB->8GB memory upgrade from Jetson Xavier NX to Orin Nano
• One package (yabloc_image_processing) failed to build. After troubleshooting, it’s found that it requires the contributed opencv packages that JetPack does not come with. To build this package, OpenCV needs to be rebuilt from source with opencv_contrib enabled (takes an additional 4-5 hours)
• It doesn't require this package to run Autoware. Users not using this package can skip the build (add --packages-skip yabloc_image_processing to the build command).
• Will port F1tenth packages and test trajectory follower demos next

AV4EV Go-Kart on AWSIM:

• The team is working to create our version of AWSIM that simulates our AV4EV Go-kart running around UPenn's Pennovation Center.
• We have explored AWSIM as well as AWSIM racing, a version designed for simulating IAC racing which is still a work in progress.
• We have begun 3D modeling UPenn's Pennovation Center building and its surrounding area to create a digital twin. They will later be ported to Unity and then AWSIM. This area is where the UPenn team tests the Go-Kart and F1tenth. Images of the Pennovation Center (first) and the current rendered version (second) are attached.
• The Purdue Grand Prix track where the Autonomous Karting Series (AKS) competition takes place will be modeled next
• After the Unity map is generated, its Lidar and lanelet maps will need to be generated as required by Autoware.

Other topics:

• AWF Work Group overview: https://autoware.org/join-a-work-group/

[atanasko]

@pojenwang "port F1tenth packages" mean port the code in f1tenth_galactic branch in the autoware universe repository? When it is expected to have this tools ported? Which branch will be used?
Did you use Jetson Orin Nano 8GB board?

[pojenwang]

We are porting Autoware.universe from main instead of f1tenth_galactic so they are updated to the latest version. We are also updating the F1tenth stack to its humble branch. Our trajectory_follower_f1tenth package will also be modified to work with the updated packages.

We'll need a few more weeks to test the update and release it to a new branch: f1tenth_humble. Yes, we are testing it on a Jetson Orin Nano 8GB.

[atanasko]

@pojenwang thank you! I intend to use it for a research project. Are there going to be some notification when the port is ready?