I've been working on this since over a year now and am happy with the results achieved, so why not brag about it :).
The project originated from ArduCopter after I bought one and started playing with it. I've rewritten all of the functional code in an object-oriented fashion. I reused the driver part of ArduCopter code, though. I'm using APM1 as low-level autopilot and iEi PM-PV-D5251 Single Board Computer (SBC) with 2GB RAM and 32GB flash for higher level tasks performed onboard. The SBC runs Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) and Robot Operating System (ROS). I used rosserial for APM<->ROS communication.
I'm planning to release the code I've been using around October as LGPL and was wondering if there is interest for such a project in the community. The platform is aimed at research entities and hobbyists. The platform I'm flying costed less than 1000USD (without laser scanner visible on images below). There is also an option to replace the SBC I'm using with a PandaBoard or BeagleBoard for lower cost (and lower performance, though). Other platforms (like fit-PC without casing) would fit too, of course.
The code is not compatible with ArduCopter any more nor I think there is need for it to be, but I'm open for all good ideas. It only supports APM1, but I think migrating to APM2 shouldn't be very hard.
Any friendly questions invited, I'm curious of your opinion. I'm planning to record a promo-video in one or two months with the quadrotor performing indoor SLAM, just don't have time for it now.
Regards,
Marcin
Replies
hi marcin (and of course everybody else from the diy-community),
after a little break i decided to go on with this project because its a lot of fun (and also a lot of work of course ;)).
i asked me how you solved the autonomous flight? you wrote that you did the communication via rosserial. i installed mavlink to connect with ros and it works fine and i get messages from mavlink, but how do i send a command right now? any idea? is there any teleop-stack that could be used for the first time? or any possibility to send a command like "start" and the copter starts and holds position at 3m for example?
hope to here from you,
patrick
Hi Marcin,
I am also very interested in Multicopter with adequate TOF camera like Kinect to be able to implement a simple SLAM system at least capable of reference point establishment, path finding and multipoint navigation.
From what I have been seeing the PX4 is a far more capable system than the APM and given it's existing application with stereo cameras it should easily have the power to deal with a Kinect like distance image which should be MUCH less computationally intensive than stereo camera image overlay distance image extraction.
Of course, the other significant news is the Capri by PrimeSense (the same people who make the Kinect) of a much smaller and lighter version of the Kinect's distance image camera.
I have a Kinect which I have been exploring with Microsoft Robotic Studio and will probably soon get a PX4 to begin experimenting with connecting them.
From what I can tell, the Capri works the same as the distance camera portion of the Kinect, so when the Capri is available it should be a drop in for a practical multicopter application.
I hope you are still pursuing this and would very much like to hear about your progress.
hi there,
congratulations to this great work!
i would be very, very happy for some informations how to communicate between APM and ROS. i have to do a project where i want to equip a 3DR ArduCopter Hexa-B Frame with pandaboard (with ROS) and kinect to do mapping and indoor SLAM, too.
for that i selled a hexacopter with APM 2.5. i don't have that time of one year, just till end of this year, so i would be very thankfull for some help.
maybe you can contact me for that?!
This looks like an impressive... thanks for sharing!
Can I ask a simple question, where did you get your blade guards?
Looking good. I see you have the hokuyo lidar on there as well.
I think it's inevitable that people will want to add higher level functions on top of the arducopter/ardupilot so it's very interesting to see that you've already done that although it also looks like you had to rewrite all the lower level stuff as well.
I think we'd thought that people would use mavlink to handle the communication between the boards so it's interesting to see you use rosserial. Presumably you think that's a much better or more natural choice? On the arducopter side we'd tend towards mavlink because that's what we already use for the GS <-> Arducopter comms...but it's probably more important that the "customer" is happy with the protocol.