ODS (Obstacle Detection System)
ODS - Obstacle Detection System - provided by ifm, is a software solution building on top of the O3R ecosystem to enable autonomously driving vehicles (AGVs / AMRs) to avoid collisions with obstacles.
The ODS application is specifically designed to detect two groups of objects, which are missed by a standard LiDAR based autonomously driving vehicle:
objects above the safety LiDAR scanner plane, that is, cantilevered objects,
and objects below the safety LiDAR scanner plane, that is, small sized objects on the floor.
Its application lies within the addition of a full 3D volumetric monitoring of the surrounding of autonomously driving vehicles - whereas LiDAR scanner planes are limited to two spatial dimensions. ODS doesn’t follow any safety regulations: for example ASIL-level or similar, and can therefore not replace a typical application of safety devices such as safety LiDAR scanners.
ODS application properties and building blocks:
ODS uses the O3R cameras as its primary data source: at least one O3R 3D camera stream is required
ODS is capable of estimating the required ego-motion information via an internal algorithm - that is, is not dependent on external ego-motion sources
ODS outputs two kind of information sets:
A 2D occupancy grid information: typically used in addition to existing navigation information to avoid and navigate around obstacles
(3D) zone information: a typical use case is the direct propagation to the chassis control system to perform braking maneuvers when obstacles are present
ODS does not classify objects: the output information is independent of the object type
multiple ODS applications can be initialized on one O3R VPU (IPC): one application instance per primary movement direction - that is, forward, backward driving
ODS is a licensed application: Please see the O3Rs release notes for additional information for compatibility tables and embedded OS versions