Maker Ilia Ovsiannikov is engaged on a pleasant do-it-yourself robotic equipment — and as a part of that work has launched a library to make it simpler to make use of a spread of lidar sensors in your Arduino sketches.
“I’ve mixed assist for numerous spinning lidar/LDS sensors into an Arduino LDS library with a single platform API [Application Programming Interface],” Ovsiannikov explains. “You possibly can set up this library from the Arduino Library Supervisor GUI. Why assist many lidar/LDS sensors? The reason being to make the {hardware} — supported by [the] Kaia.ai platform — reasonably priced to as many potential customers as attainable. A few of the sensors [suported] are offered as used robotic vacuum cleaner spare elements and price as little as $16 or so (together with delivery).”
The library delivers assist for a broad vary of lidar sensors from a unified API, Ovsiannikov explains, which means it is not solely attainable to get began shortly however to change sensors mid-project — ought to current sensors turn out to be unavailable, or pricing shift to favor a special mannequin. It additionally provides just a few neat options of its personal, together with pulse-width modulation (PWM) management of lidar motors that lack their very own management system, utilizing non-compulsory adapter boards.
Whereas the library is usable standalone, and even to carry out real-time angle and distance computation immediately on an Arduino microcontroller, Ovsiannikov has additionally revealed a companion package deal to tie it in to the Robotic Working System 2 (ROS2). “[The] Kaia.ai robotic firmware forwards LDS uncooked information — obtained from the Arduino LDS library — to a PC working ROS2 and micro-ROS,” he explains. “The ROS2 PC kaiaai_telemetry package deal receives the uncooked LDS information, decodes that information and publishes it to the ROS2 /scan subject.”
Extra data on the library is accessible in Ovsiannikov’s weblog publish, whereas the library itself is accessible on GitHub underneath the permissive Apache 2.0 license.