Pixhawk Cube orange and Jetson AGX Xavier

Hardware Pixhawk family
1

I am operating on an octorotor (custom build from a local company) only from teleoperation since now. The octorotor has a Pixhawk Orange Cube mounted on the Kore multi-rotor carrier board (https://www.spektreworks.com/products/multi-rotor-pixhawk21-carrier-board) and communicates for the basic telemetry with the raspberry Pi 4.

I purchased an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier in order to integrate automation flight algorithms based on NN detection for feature tracking with a ZED 2 stereocamera.

The NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier is set up (JetPack 4.4, CUDA 10.2 etc.), it has the basic ROS installation and the zed-ros-wrapper works well.

I now want to connect the Jetson with the Pixhawk. The guys that built the multi-rotor have given me cables coming from the SERIAL5 port of the carrier board in order to connect a TX, RX and GROUND cable for the communication.

I purchased a cheap USB to TTL cable like this one https://www.adafruit.com/product/954, i connected the cables and tried to run mavros apm.launch

The serial5 port on the carrier board is set up to speak with the cables and has a baudrate 921000 (everything from mission planner).

I also checked with an oscillator that the TX and RX cables give me pulse so they give information.

I also tried that cross connection of the cables (TX-RX and RX-TX, TX-TX and RX-RX)

All of the times when i run the mavros launch file for apm.launch with the right baudrate the rostopics where not published. It’s like there is dead communication.

I don’t know what else to try. Is there any more HW debugging you can recommend?

Is there the possibility the cable is not appropriate? How can i check this?

If everything is good HW-wise. what else can i check SW-wise?

2

I have not used the same hardware as you, so I can’t tell if there would be an issue there.

Each time I had a similar issue, it was because of wrong connection or wrong configuration.

Mavros is a little difficult for debugging, since not necessarily all topics are published to even when it works. I think it depends on your settings. It may be easier to see if you can connect with a GCS, e.g. mavproxy. After that I would try to verify that the correct serial port is selected and that the wires are connected correctly.

3

Hi, were you able to connect AGX Xavier with Pixhawk? Can you please share your approach?

4

Hello Ishan. I’m also looking for a way to interface Xavier with the Pixhawk Cube. If you have managed to find any way to do this please let me know. Meanwhile, if I stumble upon anything I’ll give you an update.

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

5

I had same problem with this, any idea how to fix the problem?, thanks.

6

I connected the cables on a cross selection (TX to RX and RX to TX) and i set everything on baudrate 921600.
We use serial5 port of the Kore board.
Sometimes when you run the MAVROS you have to tweak the stream rate real-time in order to see the flow of the data.