ESA ExoMy STEM Mars Rover

Has anybody managed to get something like this working with Ardurover?

They seem to use reassuringly expensive hardware in here!

I am thinking of making one for school and of course would rather keep it Ardu!

From their wiki, it is just using ROS for manual control so that a bit of waste

Using the new BlueRobotics Navigator board would be perfect for this as you would have both ardu and video in a RPI !

I shall look into this, thanks. I rather thought this rover could be more fun full autonomous!

Can Ardurover turn in the ways this machine can out of the box?

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I don’t think AP Rover supports this style of steering out of the box. It’s come up a few times most recently @jmachuca brought it up with me.

Hi @Gary_Mortimer,

I’ve used a Lua script for this type of steering in ArduPilot:
Enable Pivot Turn for Custom Rover Frame (there are scripts attached to the topic, they could do with an update)

It’s a generalised version of the kinematic bicycle steering model. I’ve run it on simulations in Gazebo and an RL rover. Let me know if you’d like this added to ArduPilot as a PR and I can prepare something.

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Yes please! haha… I need to get this type of steering working, we have a project that uses this type of steering and will use AP for control. It was supposed to be ready last December but its priority got pushed so It has been delayed, but I definitely need to get this working. @rhys did you ever add that gazebo simulation to GitHub?

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Yes, the ROS based Gazebo simulation is tucked away in here: GitHub - srmainwaring/curio: ROS packages to control a version of Roger Chen's Sawppy Rover.. There is a ros_control extension as well to deal with this type of rover.

There is a standalone (non-ROS) simulation for Gazebo11 that uses the AP Lua script. ardupilot_gazebo_models/models/sawppy_ardupilot at master · srmainwaring/ardupilot_gazebo_models · GitHub. I’ll see if I can get it working with Ignition Gazebo and added to SITL_Models.

I’m in the process of porting a number of old projects over to ROS2 and have finally managed to get a working ROS2 / MAVROS2 environment working on macOS with visualisation and simulation support, so all the pieces are there at long last. I’d like to get the rover controlled with AP using ROS2 for navigation.

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I keep telling folks if something you need is not there, just wait! How splendid.