Help with an autonomous outdoor driving project

Quick Q&A
#1

I’m thinking about an autonomous driving project for outdoor surveillance, I think Leo Rover could be useful for the development but due to lack of experience I’m not sure about it. I also don’t know what additional components I might need.
The idea is to walk the fence of an enclosure and see the state of it with deep learning (this part I have it solved).
I have seen that there is a tutorial for autonomous indoor navigation where components and steps to follow are specified. My doubts are:

  • Is this tutorial valid for outdoor navigation?
  • What additional hardware or software development would I need?
  • Would the development be very expensive to have a system that follows a GPS route avoiding obstacles or is it as simple as configuring correctly certain ROS modules?
  • Apart from the LIDAR sensor and the GPS sensor, would I need any other component, for example to power the sensors? would these sensors affect the autonomy of the vehicle?
    Thank you very much!!!
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#2

I’m interested in this kinda thing. I have very little actual experience with it, so take with a grain of salt.

Assuming ROS2 I think you want this Add nav2_gps_waypoint_follower by pepisg · Pull Request #2814 · ros-planning/navigation2 · GitHub

Coupled with a reasonably expensive RTK GPS What is GPS RTK? - learn.sparkfun.com

You may additionally need a base station RTK device if the bot won’t have reliable internet.

I’m interested in using Groot/behaviour trees to define waypoints, but I’m sketchy on the details of how that actually works.

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#3

Thank you very much for your reply Sam. Your links have been very helpful to me.
Looking at your links I have a couple of questions. The first one is if the Ros module you link is something usable or something still under development.
The second is about the hardware. Thanks to you I have discovered that there is RTK as a service. If I understood correctly, would I only need to add the hardware from the link I attach and contract the RTK service from one of the companies I link?

https://www.mouser.es/ProductDetail/u-blox/C099-F9P-1?qs=sGAEpiMZZMu3sxpa5v1qrkD3WkoL55j%2Bes93UkB8oKg%3D

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#4

I don’t know. It seems likely it will be accepted into Nav2 shortly, but it’s been slow.

I think so. there are cheaper options SparkFun GPS-RTK-SMA Breakout - ZED-F9P (Qwiic) - GPS-16481 - SparkFun Electronics not sure about the subscription service. Tour robot needs connectivity at that point.

I’m interested in this $50 RTK: $50 Skytraq RTK receiver has anyone used it? - #34 by Energize - Other Hardware - ArduPilot Discourse but can’t tell if it’s any good