SLAM 101

SLAM stands for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. It has been and still is one of the unsolved problems in robotics.The main purpose of SLAM is for a robot to build the map of an unknown environment as well as know its position inside that environment
Therefore SLAM tries to answer the 2 main question for a robot:

1. Where am I ?
2. What does my surrounding look like ?

SLAM can be divided into these core components:

Update

Yes this is a short post. I promise theres a big blog coming on one of the most interesting problems in robotics. So stay tuned for that. So here is an update post on the project.

We are trying to work out the payload capacity of the drone and therefore the thrust that is going to be reauired for successfully flying the drone. We had it worked out when we ran into another problem. Initially we had planned to use just the LiDAR for mapping but as you ca see from my past posts that the LiDAR that we are using is a 2D LiDAR. The issue arises here that since we can see that the drone navigates in 3D thus plotting only 2D may not be the best aproach.

YD LiDAR Setup for ROS2 Humble

The resources present on the internet for setting up the YDLidar SDK and integrating with ROS has been quite vague. So I am documenting the steps here for future reference.

Here is my setup for reference:
Ubuntu 22.04
ROS2 Humble

LiDAR Used: YDLidar X2

YD LiDAR SDK Setup

First of all we need to install the YDLidar SDK from their official github repo. The link for the same can be found here: YDLidar-SDK

The LiDAR Drone Idea

IDEA:
To mount a LiDAR sensor on top of a drone to allow for real time obstacle avoidance. This should allow to fly the drone in an indoor environment autonomously. The drone will also have a camera mounted on it for active person tracking and following while maintaining a safe distance.

So in order to begin with the development we started with a drone frame and a LiDAR sensor. The LiDAR sensor used is a 2 dimensional LiDAR sensor which is capable of providing 360 degree scan of the environment.