2024-02-29 Racing Working Group Meeting

[pojenwang]

Administrative

Previous Meeting Minutes

Attendees

• Po-Jen Wang (AWF)
• Mitsudome-san (Tier.IV)
• Jack Silberman (UCSD)
• David Walmroth (Open AD Kit / Pix-Moving)

Minutes: Po-Jen Wang

Topics

Autoware on F1tenth (JetPack6)

• Currently updating and validating the documentation for running Autoware on JetPack6, this includes testing the RecordReplay_demo on a real car
• Code and instructions will be published to a new repo: f1tenth_humble

Go-kart Simulator Update

• Successfully built Unreal Editor from source for Ubuntu and installed SodaSim as a Plugin.
• SodaSim based on Unreal engine has many vehicle dynamic models (for games) that can be directly integrated into the go-kart.
  -- It includes a simple bicycle model that can be used for the initial testing of the planners.
  -- It includes advanced models with ~50 parameters (body, transmission, suspension, brake, etc) to tune.
  -- It includes AI agents (drivers) that can be added to the environment.
  -- Track generation from JSON files. The map file can be converted from F1tenth track files.
• Go-kart integration into the simulator is successful. Now we can manually drive the go-kart with the keyboard.
• Lidar/camera data generation and ROS2 interface are also successful. The data can be viewed on RViz.
• We are cleaning up the Pennovation Center environment and go-kart 3D models for faster rendering. Pennovation Center environment will then be imported into the simulator.
• Pointclould map and lanelet generation in the simulator will be the next step, followed by Autoware integration and testing.

Go-kart Simulator Environment Editor Proposal

• The 3D environment we built is meant to include only permanent static objects, such as buildings, trees, curbs, etc. However, there are other temporary static objects that we want to include, and their properties (poses) in the environment should be easily configurable
• Examples of these objects include parked cars, construction barrels/cones/fences, air ducts from F1tenth, line boundaries, or even the light source (sun)
• The game engine editor of the simulator would be able to do all of these, however, it requires the installation and some knowledge of the game engine editor. If a binary version of the simulator is released, it will not have the editor capability. It is also not cross-platform between different game engines(Unreal, Unity, Isaac Sim, etc)
• The goal is to develop a simple environment editing tool for easily adding and modifying these temporary objects to create tracks for go-kart or F1tenth
• The current thought is to build a GUI that shows the top-down view map of the environment, the user can use the cursor to select one of the pre-defined temporary objects from the GUI and place it on the top-down view map at a desired pose. Repeat this process until all temporary objects are placed
• An environment config file in JSON format can be created that logs the poses and other properties of the temporary objects. The simulator will load the config file at launch and add the temporary objects to the base environment map
• The GUI can be developed and run in OpenCV's image display window. Can look into other options.

Other topics:

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