Betatesting Drone Rescue People Exercise

[JitinSaxenaa]

Hi @jmplaza @javizqh

I tried out the “Drone Rescue People” exercise and overall it’s really interesting, but I came across a few things that could be improved, especially for beginners.

1 - First, the ventral (left) camera feed feels slightly delayed compared to what’s actually happening in the simulation. For example, even after the drone has already moved past a boat, it still appears in the feed for a moment. The same happens with people — they show up a bit late. This makes it a little confusing when trying to tune the detection logic.

2 - Another thing is the search area. The exercise docs gives GPS coordinates, but since we don’t really work with GPS in the simulator, they don’t help much. As a new user, it’s not very clear where exactly to look and locate as the area is quite large.

It might help to improve the doc as -

• Give approximate simulator coordinates (x, y) for the region
• Include a simple example like “start searching around [30, -40]”

3 - Detection consistency
Another issue I noticed is with face detection. Some faces are detected correctly, while others are missed even when they look quite similar in the camera feed. (Can be seen in the demo video)

4 - Drift and restart behavior
I also noticed that the drift issue and the sudden drop of the drone when the simulation is paused or restarted still seem to be present. As mentioned by @javizqh, this was supposed to be fixed in the latest version, but it still persists in my testing.

jitin@UNSTOPPABLE:~/RoboticsAcademy$ git describe --tags
v6.1.4-10-g332532ed

5 - Intermittent RTPS error

While running the simulation, I occasionally encountered an error related to RTPS shared memory (e.g., “RTPS_TRANSPORT_SHM Error: open_and_lock_file failed”). This does not happen every time.

Demo video - Link

[javizqh]

For number 4 you need the latest RADI version, not RA version

[javizqh]

1- It is normal, they do not update with a lot of frequency and there is delay when sending the images
2- It is intended
3- That is a problem with Haar Cascades, as it is an old and simple algorithym
4- What I said above
5- That is some ROS trace. It does not affect the execution

[JitinSaxenaa]

Got it, does the latest RADI version already include the fix for the drift and sudden drop issue or is it still pending release?

[javizqh]

In the latest RADI version should work fine