here's a test of the fiducial marker system

I teleoperate the robot to within view of a fiducial marker, then the robot plans the grasp on its own, slowing down as it gets close to its objective.

The idea is that the global planner in ROS can get the robot to the rough vicinity of an object, then a separate planner can issue precise commands based on the observed fiducials to perform the grasp.

Because the gripper obscures view of the object during grasping, the fiducial can't be on the object itself. To do that I'll have to add a feature to trust the wheel odometry when the fiducial is lost.

In the first version of the planner code I had also accounted for marker rotation, ensuring that the robot approached from the same angle every time. But the orientation of the observed marker is very noisy, especially when at a distance, leading to bad oscillations.

I call the planner april_planner, check out the code on github: https://github.com/Jack000/april_planner

the node issues command velocities directly instead of going through the navigation stack.