General description of WEpods project
Robot Engineered Systems (RES) is developing self-driving shuttle buses called WEpods. In the last few years, we developed software for two WEpods. They are driving at Wageningen University campus, in mixed traffic on public roads. Those WEpods are small, 6 person shuttles that drive at limited speed (max 25km/h). The fact that we have a permission to test and operate on public roads makes us quite unique in The Netherlands, the EU, and even worldwide. Currently, we are in the process of building our new, next generation autonomous shuttle bus, as part of the EU subsidized Interreg Automated Transport project. It will be equipped with several cameras, radars, and lidars to provide a clear perception of the world around us. The bus will have space for 16 persons and our goal is to make it drive autonomously up to 50km/h. This increase in speed from 25km/h to 50km/h requires improvements at practically all levels of our current hardware and software stack.
Robot Engineered Systems is part of Robot Robots Company and has two sister companies called Robot Care Systems and Robot Security Systems, respectively developing an elderly care robot and a security robot. Robot Robots Company is a young, fast growing scale-up company, with lots of interesting development projects going on. We all work in the same building, so you will be part of an inspiring and fun engineering team. We are located in The Hague, a few busstops from railway station Den Haag Laan van NOI.
Project description
The vehicle has multiple cameras that generate more than 10GB of raw camera data per minute. Camera stream compression using for example (hardware based) h264 compression could reduce that to 10x or even 100x less (we can trade compression rate against compression quality) at limited usage of computer resources. This compressed data can then be logged locally or streamed to a remote control room.
The goal of the internship is to implement the image compression for cameras on the Nvidia Drive PX2 platform, preferably publishing the image data on compressed image ROS topics. Additionally, ways to stream these camera streams to a remote control room should be investigated, for example using WebRTC. A 4G based secure connection to a remote control room is already available. The internship will be done using Ubuntu Linux and ROS (Robot Operating System) with C++ as the main programming language.