Common Services

The ASE team provides a growing library of services that are ready to be used in your pipeline. The most important services are listed here.

Elias Groot

Software Lead, Project Administrator

Official ASE services

• The actuator service: send it a steering value or motor speed and it will take care of the hardware signals for you
• The imaging service: preprocesses camera frames from a USB camera and detects the NXP cup track edges for you
• The controller service: takes in track edge data (for example from the imaging service) and tries to generate servo and speed commands to smoothly steer around the track
• The distance service: implements the hardware communication to read distance data from the ultrasonic distance sensor on the Rover
• The energy service: reports energy metrics (electric current, voltage) for Rovers with a current sensor.
• The lidar service: implements the hardware communication to read scans from Rovers with a LiDAR sensor

Service Ideas

To understand how pipelines can get more sophisticated, think about...

• ...a 3d-controller service that uses the lidar service to steer and maps out buildings
• ...an ai-controller service that communicates with an online ML model to make steering decisions
• ...a sim-imaging service that sends data to the original controller service based on simulated inputs
  • and a sim-actuator to take the steering commands generated by the controller service and actuates them in a simulator
• ...a command-capture service that captures all frames from the imaging service to create a video of the lap
  • and a command-replay service to issue these commands again to the controller service to replay laps on the Rover
• ...a faulty-imaging service that injects random errors, to test how resilient the controller service is

The sky is the limit. And because you can quickly swap out services and build new pipelines, you can experiment and iterate rapidly. To show this, the next milestone will be to write your own service.