My team is building an autonomous rover, designed to operate in a lunar environment. This means our environment is going to be fairly bright and somewhat lacking in visual features. We also expect the environment to be rather monochrome. We’re currently looking to use 2x Zed X cameras and a Zed box mini w/ an orin nano 8 GB. Our intent is to use global localization with Nav2, relying primarily on the Zed SDK for localization. Our environment will also include some craters and boulders, so we’re hoping to use the 3d point cloud for dynamic costmap creation. We will also be running ROS2 on the orin nano in order to control our robot. We intend to mount one camera on the front of our rover, and one on the rear, as our rover is designed such that it can move in either direction.
I have a couple of questions relating to this setup.
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Is the hardware we intend to buy sufficient for our use case? I’m primarily concerned about the compute box, as I’m not familiar with the requirements for the operations I named above in conjunction with the demands of ROS2.
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What power draw can we expect with this setup and doing these computations? It’s my understanding that the Zed X cameras draw around 1W each, but I’m not sure what kind of power draw we would expect from the orin nano.
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As we’ll be operating in somewhat dusty conditions, is there a recommended method for keeping dust off the camera lens? We’re currently planning to implement windshield-wipers of a sort, but we’d like confirmation that won’t cause any issues.