Software
Open-source software is an important part of what I do. Here are some open-source packages I’ve developed or contributed to. For quick reference here’s the list:
- DeepSpeech ROS Node
We’ve been wanting to get speech recognition running on the MKZ, but we didn’t want to use a cloud provider and the standard ROS tools for speech are honestly just not very good. Mozilla has invested an impressive amount of effort over the past few years into building an open-source version of Baidu’s DeepSpeech system, which gives state-of-the-art recognition performance for English speech. Additionally, they’ve released a pre-trained model for speech recognition that achieves a word-error rate of less than seven percent! Some of my undergraduate students and I have written a ROS wrapper for this model, and released it so that roboticists everywhere can yell at their robots and have at least some hope that the robots will understand :)
- Novatel GNSS Driver
The first thing we had to write when we got our MKZ from AutonomouStuff was a driver for the Novatel GNSS system that came with the car. Baidu had written a robust solution for the same Novatel hardware as a part of their Apollo Project, but it was tightly integrated into the rest of their system. In this package, I adapted Baidu’s driver code to function as a standalone ROS package that we could run with or without the rest of an autonomous car platform.
- PR2 Kinetic Packages
One of the most frustrating things about working with a PR2 is the need to work with an old Ubuntu distribution and an old ROS distribution. This collection of packages aims to fix that by making the PR2 work on ROS Kinetic with Gazebo and Moveit on Ubuntu 16.04.
I built this collection by starting with the Indigo versions of the packages and modifying them until all of the Kinetic incompabilities were gone. It’s been tested on several machines by several people, and is good enough for simulation. We haven’t tried it on the Nevada PR2 yet, but when we do I’ll update this code as needed.