2.9 RapidSense Overview & Specification
- Kurt Dudek
RapidSense Overview:
RapidSense is a software platform that enables operation of robots within dynamic, unstructured environments. Users select what parts of the platform they wish to leverage to address their needs. RapidSense offers several sensors a user can select from or a generic sensor, if they prefer to use their own vision source. Users define volumes within which RapidSense operates and have the option of specifying additional functionality to perform within those volumes such as object detection or change detection. A volume’s default behavior is to provide dynamic collision avoidance through the scan scene command. The following diagram illustrates RapidSense’s platform architecture.
Concept of Operation
Users create volumes in RapidSense by drawing cuboids via the RTR control panel. The volumes can be resized, named, and deleted. Figure 2 illustrates the concept. Users can create filters and assign them to a volume. After assigning a filter to a volume, users can then query the filter in real-time, and modify the filter parameters to suit your application. Multiple filters can be assigned to a single volume, however, a filter instantiation can only be associated to a single volume.
Architecture
RapidSense is built on a reactive, high performance architecture, called the actor-design pattern. This architecture is a message passing pattern for distributed, event-based systems. Most filters are implemented as independent actors. The interface to RapidSense is REST-based. As users configure RapidSense the configuration is persisted by RapidSense allowing users to configure a system once and then reuse that same configuration until a change is desired. Figure 3 is a breakdown of the actors comprising RapidSense.
Filters
Filters are created and associated to volumes. Each filter has its own set of configurable parameters that are exposed to users allowing adjustments for specific applications. Every volume can contain multiple filters, however, a filter instantiation may only be tied with a single volume or sensor (in the case of model-based filters). Whenever a filter is created, updated, or deleted, the RapidSense configuration file is updated accordingly saving the user’s progress. This allows users to restart RapidSense and pick back up from where they last left off.
RapidSense currently supports the Height Check filter.
Height Check Filter
The height filter returns the maximum height within a specified area within a specific volume. The units are all in meters. More details for height filter can be found here.