£380 RTK base & Rover?

ROS Projects
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I spotted the £280 Here3 RTK base and Rover which seems very cheap.

I’d need to add a ~£100 Pixhawk to my rover, and configure it for ROS2

pixhawk
pixhawk1043×600 81.5 KB

Is there some really obvious reason why more people aren’t using this hardware?

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I have used Pixhawk on many platforms (mostly drones and an USV) using ROS1. I’m not sure what’s the current state of affairs with PX4 and ROS2 but here are some of my unstructured thoughts on this:

  • Using autopilot can quickly get you up and running for some applications but if you need some modifications to how things work it can be non-trivial. As an example Arducopter would provide you a default TF frame with transform odom->base_link using onboard sensor data. If you want to recreate the map->odom->base_link setup you will likely spend a significant time tweaking this and you probably will end up running EKF on the ROS side instead of the autopilot
  • If used only for sensors data (IMU, RTK) this can be a great choice, it could just be slightly inefficient to modify the parameters as you would likely need to go through a GCS
  • If you use the autopilot as the main driving unit, then offboard works great, however I personally prefer having more control on the ROS side

If I was to choose I would probably pay a bit more and get ArduSimple RTK modules and try to use an existing Ublox nodes.

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Yes, I was imagining this being primarily a ROS2 robot, which just happened to get it’s RTK & IMU data from a Pixhawk.

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