Manual Control

Equipment Required:

  • Fully built F1TENTH vehicle

  • Pit/Host computer

  • Logitech F710 joypad

Approximate Time Investment: 30 minutes - ∞ There is no time limit on fun!

Overview

Before we can get the car to drive itself, it’s a good idea to test the car to make sure it can successfully drive on the ground under human control. Controlling the car manually is also a good idea if you’ve recently re-tuned the VESC or swapped out a drivetrain component, such as the motor or gears. Doing this step early can spare you a headache debugging your code later since you will be able to rule out lower-level hardware issues if your code doesn’t work.

You MUST connect to the Jetson via SSH or Remote Desktop for this section.

1. Vehicle Inspection

We want to minimize the number of accidents so before we begin, let’s first inspect our vehicle.

  1. Make sure you have the car running off its LIPO battery.

  2. Plug the USB dongle receiver of the Logitech Joypad into the USB hub.

  3. Make sure you have the VESC connected.

  4. Ensure that both your car and laptop are connected to a wireless access point if you need the car connected to the Internet while you drive it. Otherwise, go back and go through Configure Jetson and Peripherals.

  5. Make sure you’ve cloned the f110_system repository and set up your docker container as explained in the previous section.

  6. This section uses the program tmux (available via apt-get) to let you run multiple terminals over one SSH connection, and multiple terminals inside the container. You can also use the remote desktop if you prefer a GUI.

2. Driving the Car

  1. Open a terminal on the Pit laptop and SSH into the car from your computer.

  2. Launch teleop following the instructions for Launching and Testing teleop and the LiDAR in either driver stack setup or driver stack setup inside a docker container depending on your setup.

  3. Hold the LB button (Dead man’s switch) on the controller to start controlling the car. Use the left joystick to move the car forward and backward and the right joystick for steering. If you’re using Logitech F710, switch the switch at the back of the joystick to D. The mode light in the front of the joystick should not be constantly on. If it is, press the mode button once.

Troubleshooting

  • During teleop, if the joystick is not mapped correctly, you can change the mapping in /f1tenth_ws/src/f1tenth_system/f1tenth_stack/config/joy_teleop.yaml in the container. To identify the mapping, you can launch the bringup launch, and echo the /joy topic. Move the joystick axis around, you should change in the echoed message. The index of the changed value in the array when you move a joystick in on direction is the axis id to that joystick direction. After identifying the correct indices, change the yaml to reflect it under human_control.

  • If nothing happens, one reason can be that the driver name is listening on the wrong port for the joystick. To double check, you can check joy_teleop.yaml again for the device_name pararmeter. If you’re using the Logitech joystick, the name should match with the udev name we’ve set up before. If you’re using another joystick and did not set udev rules, you can check the assigned name by running ls /dev/input/*. It’ll usually follow the format /dev/input/js*, for example /dev/input/js0.

  • Note that the LB button acts as a “dead man’s switch”, as releasing it will stop the car. This is for safety in case your car gets out of control.

  • You can see a mapping of all controls used by the car in the joy_teleop.yaml file. For example, in the default configuration, axis 1 (left joystick’s vertical axis) is used for throttle, and axis 2 (right joystick’s horizontal axis) is used for steering. These might be different joystick to joystick.

  • Motor rotation direction negated. If you’re car is driving backwards when commanded driving forward, move to the next section to see how to reverse it.

  • VESC out of sync errors: Check that the VESC is connected. If the error persists, make sure you’re using the right VESC firmware.

  • Serial port busy errors: Your VESC might have just booted up, give it a few seconds and try again.

  • SerialException errors and you’re using the 30LX Hokuyo, the errors might be due to a port conflict: make sure you’ve set up udev rules, as explained in this section.

  • urg_node related errors: Check the ports (e.g. an ip address in sensors.yaml can only be used by 10LX, not 30LX, and vice-versa for the udev name /dev/sensors/hokuyo).