Description

While working on the a robotics research project involving ROS, I noticed that the IMU I have been using, namely "Sparkfun's VR IMU" did not have a ROS Package. Hooking it up to an Arduino board, and adding publishers and subscribers seemed to do the trick, but a special UART-RVC mode worked directly using an FTDI Interface. And hence, I developed a small script to make sure the IMU runs without using an Ardunio. Just Plug and Play!

Hardware Setup

Kindly Refer Here

Steps Required for using the ROS Version

• Connect the IMU
• Paste the serial_uart_rvc_ros.py file to a package

catkin_make 

and then

rosrun <package_name> serial_uart_rvc_ros

Steps to use the Non-ROS Version (just for visualizing)

• Connect the IMU, and use the command

python3 vizualize.py

Working Demo

TO DO -

• Filter the data incoming from the IMU by applying a Kalman/Complimentary Filter.
• Using DeQueue, increase the performance of the code.