Pixhawk 2 with Jetson TX2 Build

What’s this About

I’m rebuilding The Groundhog to a more professional level, with the level of accuracy required for the AI and computer vision work planned.  It’s also getting an upgrade to the avionics to make it more resilient.  This post details the rebuild and also has links to the 3D printed parts used.

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First Flight: Intel RealSense D435 Depth Camera on Jetson TX2

 

This is part of a series of posts outlining the evolution of my GroundHog hexacopter into a multi-role UAV.  It is based on a Pixhawk flight controller with a Jetson TX2 companion computer.  It has now been fitted with an Intel RealSense D435 depthcam.

Intel Realsense D435 on Jetson TX2

Here’s a quick technical post for anyone attempting to harness the capabilities of a Realsense D435 camera on a Jetson TX2.  For me, this is about getting usable depth perception on a UAV, but it has proved more problematic than I originally anticipated.

This post aims to provide some simple instructions that now work for me, but took a long time to find out!

The Problem

The Intel librealsense2 library does not support ARM architectures as I write.  This causes a fatal compile error when the file librealsense/src/image.cpp is accessed, as it queries the system architecture.

Solution

Modify image.cpp as in my Github gist here.  This bypasses the architecture check.

Installation Sequence

• Flash the TX2 with JetPack 3.2
• git clone https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense.git
• cd librealsense
• sudo apt-get update
• modify librealsense/src/image.cpp as per gist above
• sudo apt-get install git cmake
• sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
• sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev pkg-config libgtk-3-dev
• sudo apt-get install libglfw3-dev
• sudo apt-get install libudev-dev
• sudo apt-get install cmake-curses-gui
• sudo cp config/99-realsense-libusb.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
• sudo udevadm control –reload-rules && udevadm trigger
• reboot
• mkdir build && mkdir install
• cd build
• cmake ../ -DBUILD_EXAMPLES=true -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release -DBUILD_UNIT_TESTS=false
• make -j4
• sudo make install
• Connect D435 to the USB3 port
• Navigate to the tools at usr/local/bin, such as:
  • ./realsense-viewer

Issues

I am getting some warnings of incomplete frames, but it’s not clear if this is due to a power issue on the powered hub or a software configuration.  Despite this, the provided tools seem to work well and demonstrates some of the best depth camera capabilities I have seen (and this is my third depth camera to date).