eRTIS Software Usage Guide

These wiki pages hold basic documentation on using the eRTIS device type and how to use the existing software packages on it.

eRTIS device

An eRTIS (embedded Real Time Imaging Sonar) device is the sensor made by Cosys-Lab meant for applications in industrial environments where traditional sensing modalities such as LiDAR or cameras fail due to medium distortions. In these application scenarios, ultrasound can still retrieve high-resolution 3D object perception, allowing unencumbered sensing in challenging sensing scenarios.

Our eRTIS device consists of a proprietary sonar hardware with a 32-element microphone array and a NVIDIA Jetson embedded GPU compute system. These systems work together to provide the user with the ability for both recording new measurements as well as (real time) processing of these recordings using our digital signal processing pipeline.

you can learn a bit more about our sensors and find our publications here at 3Dsonar.eu.

Guides

• Powering the eRTIS device
• Initial Connection & Network Setup
• RTIS Network Usage
• Developing remotely with an RTIS Remote Dev wrapper
• Developing Python remotely with PyCharm

General Tips

• Protect your ears!! The sensor in its active mode is loud. It can be as loud as 114dB at 10cm and 96dB at 1m away from the sensor. This is similar to holding an active drill next to your ears. Please always use hearing protection and be mindful of your surroundings. Please make sure no other people or animals are in front of the sensor. Make sure you aim the sensor away from you and others.
• The back of the sensor has a blinking LED that will show when a measurement is taking place.
• The internal storage is already rather filled on most eRTIS devices. Make sure to store data and other new software on the /mnt/data path which points to the available external USB drive connected to each eRTIS device. This by default is 250GB of free space to use.

Pre-installed Software

The eRTIS device internally uses an NVIDIA Jetson-embedded GPU compute system to fulfill all computing needs for both the sonar recordings or other applications. By default, we have prepared the Jetson default with some software packages to facilitate many possible applications and setups. Here is a short list of the most important packages:

• Python 3.6 (with modules RTIS Dev, RTIS Serial, NumPy, SciPy, TensorFlow 2, Matplotlib, pandas,...)
• RTIS Network Client
• RTIS Update
• RTIS Dev Remote
• NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit
• NVIDIA cuDNN
• NVIDIA VisionWorks
• Docker
• OpenCV
• TensorRT
• ROS

Most RTIS Software packages can be automatically updated to their latest versions using RTIS Update.