Comment by AndrewF on May 25, 2011 at 9:50am

Ralph,

I think one interesting goal would be to have ROS upload/edit waypoints on the APM.  This could allow APM to interact with some of the path planners available for ROS.  If a map is provided with a desired target point (to photograph or something) as well as various obstacles to avoid, ROS could plan and upload a safe set of waypoints to get to the target.  Also if you wanted to photograph a large area, a ROS planner could be used to determine a set of waypoints that allow the aircraft path to cover the entire area, for example.

Comment by Ritchie on May 25, 2011 at 9:55am

I presume this is the WillowGarage ROS?

I'd hope the end evolution would be swarm control so GPS, heading and speed should be of paramount importance. I can think of more but I think that is the most important as it will help single craft in tracking as well as the people having fun with many.

Comment by mquintilian on May 25, 2011 at 10:17am

I was thinking of doing this but never got around to it...It would be neat to replicate AscTec Pelican drone node so you could use it as a drop in replacement for the quad. It then would be compatible with the code that MIT & Stanford use for there aerial quad kinect SLAM. It would also be much cheaper than a <$10,000 AscTec system

Comment by Cliff-E on May 25, 2011 at 11:10am

You may want to look at Player (which integrates nicely into ROS). once you establish a node interface with the ROS server, then it's just another data stream.

One thing everyone is using ROS is for hooking in collision avoidance routines... and computer vision stuff (hmmm, there's got to be something to do with FPV and ROS)...

Comment by Ralph Castain on May 25, 2011 at 11:47am

This is indeed the WillowGarage ROS. I'll take a look at these use-cases and get back to you on degree of difficulty. Sending heading, speed, and other sensor-related data from APM to ROS is pretty easy. I haven't studied going the reverse direction yet.

 

I'll also take a look at Player and Pelican - those terms are new to me :-)

 

Comment by Ritchie on May 25, 2011 at 12:51pm

Well what I thought was with the heading, speed and location collision avoidance could be done for a swarm. Intelligent mapping and stuff like that would only be a few steps away.

Comment by Paul Mather on May 25, 2011 at 1:04pm

Make it run native on Windows.....

 

...just had to throw that in there....an inside joke....I might be the only one who gets it.....which makes it that much more awesome....

Comment by mquintilian on May 25, 2011 at 1:24pm

@HappyKillmore
Sorry for lowering the awesomeness of the joke, I got it too...
One of the coolest things about ROS is the Microsoft kinect support so it can be used for SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping) for indoor use. Does anybody know what UC Berkley uses for there quads to interface with there motion capture system? I think it may be ROS as I'm pretty sure the use pelican quads.

Comment by Ralph S. on May 25, 2011 at 11:05pm

It might be interesting to identify a lightweight, small, ubunto-enabled board to install on the UAV. This way any high level computations (e.g. SLAM) could be done onboard and the UAV could gain a lot of autonomy. (I'm just looking into doing this for a ground vehicle but with an probably too heavy, too much power consuming Atom-based board...)

Comment by Garry Qualls on May 26, 2011 at 12:40am

Ralph, you might want to take a look at the Beagleboard for a way to fly Ubuntu on a UAV. As I remember, the regular Beagleboards are about 2 grams heavier than a regular Arduino Mega. If you need more performance, sometimes you can find the Beagleboard-xM or the Pandaboard in stock. People run ROS on Beagleboards, so there are tutorials and files available on different web sites that can get you started.

Chris Anderson posted about ROS-MAVLink-ArduPilot Mega integration and linked to the ROS package back in March, so people might want to take a look at that:

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/willow-garage-announces-ros

Ralph Castain, I am also interested in publishing new waypoints to an APM using ROS. I guess my full wish list for ROS integration would be a) read/write APM waypoints using ROS b) have APM publish current state, including next waypoint c) send data from another GPS to the APM through ROS and d) send heading+alt+airspeed from another source into the APM through ROS. I'm guessing (a) and (b) can already be handled through ROS<->MAVLink package?

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