Getting intensity field

[ghost]

Environment

Ubuntu 22.04

Gazebo

Problem

I am trying to use https://github.com/RobotecAI/RGLGazeboPlugin in my project, and it works great apart from the fact that it does not provide the intensity field. I have looked thorugh the api briefly and tried to get the intensity fields like so:

        if (!CheckRGL(rgl_graph_get_result_data(rglNodeRaytrace, RGL_FIELD_INTENSITY_F32, resultIntensities.data()))) {
            ignerr << "Failed to get intensity result data from RGL lidar.\n";
            return;
        }

This for some reason completely breaks the plugin with the following error:

[Err][Utils.cc:32] invalid state - unrecoverable error occurred 

Reading through the API code, I now see that the intensity field might not even be calculated? From this line, it seems that the intensity field, even if I can somehow access it, will only contain 100.

Are there any plans to add the intensity field calculations or lase_retro support? or is it already implemented somewhere that I am missing?

Thanks.

[prybicki]

Thank you for reaching out @AJsamk!

Your observations are correct - at the moment intensity field is a placeholder so that we can emit ROS2 messages that require this field.

Good news: we are already working on intensity simulation. This a pretty complex topic since intensity can be modeled with a varying degree of sophistication. We aim to release a PoC (sampling a pre-baked texture) by the end of June.

The unrecoverable error you encountered should not happen regardless of the intensity being dummy. Thank you for the report! CC @nebraszka to add appropriate tests.

[ghost]

Hi @prybicki,

Thanks for responding and that is very good news! Just wanted to also check if you are planning on providing support for laser_retro. As we do have some Models where we would like to be in control of the reflective intensity (that we will have tested out in the real-world).

I will maybe work on trying to see if this can be added myself since we do need it, and I would be grateful if you could support.

[prybicki]

@AJsamk
As far as I know, laser_retro is a single number per entity that describes uniform reflectivity. That's much simpler than the solution we currently develop (we aim to pre-bake textures).

Recently, we implemented a quite similar feature to provide instance segmentation, i.e., assigning an integer to an entity and including it in point attributes. Uniform reflectivity could be implemented similarly. You can look at this branch implementing instance segmentation. I'd start with adding an API call (in core.h) rgl_entity_set_reflectance_uniform(rgl_entity_t, float). Please reach out if you'd have any questions.

[msz-rai]

@AJsamk @prybicki
I believe we can close this issue since we have implemented intensity in v0.14.0. Some plugins still are waiting for the update, but here in the native library, the feature is done.

[ghost]

@msz-rai apologies for the delayed response, yes I'm happy to follow along with the plugin issue and close the base one.