XWR ROS Node¶

A ROS 2 node wrapping the XWR data collection pipeline can be found in the xwr_ros package.

Setup¶

Follow the hardware and software setup instructions for your radar and capture card.
- Don't forget to set the capture card's IP address to 192.168.33.30 as described in the software setup.
- You should also create a config file
Install uv and colcon-uv:
```
pip install uv colcon-uv
```
After cloning xwr_ros into your ROS 2 workspace (or adding it as a submodule), build the ROS node with colcon-uv:
```
UV_VENV_CLEAR=1 UV_LINK_MODE=symlink colcon build
```
This will create a uv venv and install necessary dependencies.

Run the ROS node¶

Increase the socket receive buffer size before starting streaming:

sudo sysctl -w net.core.rmem_max=6291456  # 6.3 MiB = 8 frames @ 786KiB each.

Then, launch the streaming node with the config file.

ros2 launch xwr_ros radar.launch.py config:=config

This will publish radar signal topic /xwr/iq.

To run signal processing visualization:

ros2 run xwr_ros process

This will publish range_doppler and range_azimuth visualization images to /xwr/range_doppler and /xwr/range_azimuth.

Messages¶

The ROS node publishes the following messages:

ChirpInfo:

std_msgs/Header header

float32 frequency       # GHz
float32 idle_time       # us
float32 adc_start_time  # us
float32 ramp_end_time   # us
float32 tx_start_time   # us
float32 freq_slope      # MHz/us
uint16 adc_samples      # number of samples per chirp
uint16 sample_rate      # kHz
uint16 frame_length     # number of chirps per frame

IQ:

std_msgs/Header header

std_msgs/Int16MultiArray iq     # raw data
bool complete