On August 26, at the “WRC-2017 ROS Global Developers Summit” hosted by Gao Gong Industrial Research and the China Electronics Society, and organized by Gao Gong Robotics and Tony Robotics, Lin Haozhi, the founder of Taiwan Hypha ROS Workshop, delivered a speech titled “Hypha RaceCar – Development and Application of Low-Cost, High-Speed Intelligent Vehicle”.

The full name of Racecar is “Rapid Autonomous Complex-Environment Competing Ackermann-steering Robot”, which is a small racing car that operates without human intervention in complex environments. Utilizing high-performance embedded computing devices, multiple sensors, the ROS framework, and self-designed algorithms, the project aims to achieve automatic driving of the racing car. The Racecar project focuses on racing while also emphasizing the autonomy and safety of the vehicle during operation.

Hypha ROS Workshop has two self-assembled workshops and has conducted five speeches and skill training sessions to date, gaining technical support from ten universities and laboratories as well as over five enterprises. In 2017, Hypha ROS Workshop held a summer school on “ROS Robot Operating System and Its Applications” at East China Normal University. Lin Haozhi stated that Hypha ROS Workshop will provide a variety of ROS-related products and services to the public, including workshops, technical consulting, AGVs, and household robots.

When discussing why they chose the RaceCar project, Lin Haozhi said that the RaceCar platform can provide comprehensive support for ROS, achieving a 2D navigation stack. Due to the use of ARM SBC, low-cost Lidar systems, and MEMS inertial measurement devices, the overall cost is relatively low. In addition, RaceCar not only has high speed and performance, but also ensures safety and has the ability to evaluate and compare algorithms, as well as strong modularity and scalability.

Since RaceCar is developed in an open-source and open-hardware manner, the cost of Hypha RaceCar is only 600 USD. Its core components include: a 1:10 scale “Ready to go” chassis, FUTABA S9151 digital servos, a 7.4V 5000mAh battery for 1:10 vehicles, an Odroid XU4 development board, the third-generation Odroid official wireless module, Odroid components, Rplidar laser radar, Arduino UNO development board, Arduino Nano development board, and GY85 IMU sensor module.

Lin Haozhi introduced the hardware and software architecture of Hypha RaceCar, including positioning, navigation, sensors, actuators, drivers, low-level controllers, SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) technology, and ranging methods, analyzing the characteristics of several common algorithms in 2D SLAM technology: Gmapping, Hector SLAM, and MRPT-ICP SLAM, and explaining the advantages of using the ROS EKF package in laser ranging. Additionally, he elaborated on the principles of ROS navigation and the working principles of Hypha RaceCar’s core controller: the L1 controller.

Lin Haozhi stated that Hypha ROS Workshop will develop and apply visual ranging technology, combining a monocular camera at 120 frames per second with laser ranging, and will hold bilingual ROS guidance and communication sessions for students and beginners worldwide. It is reported that Hypha ROS Workshop will host the first RaceCar open competition in Taipei at the end of this year.

Lin Haozhi said: All our work is done on ROS, so we adhere to the core spirit of ROS, which is open source. Hypha ROS Workshop will publish its materials and documents in the ROS community and develop more advanced tracking controllers. Lin Haozhi indicated that they will also evolve towards ROS 2.0 in the future.