I've posted a bunch of teaser videos of the Solo swarming we do often at 3DR, but have not yet posted instructions on how to do it yourself -- I was just waiting for the team to document the steps. Well good news: now they have!
The above video (sorry for the shaky camera -- we were excited) shows a fun exercise in in using the Solo drones to autonomously play Pong with themselves. Each "paddle" is made up of two Solos. The "ball" is the fifth. All this is automatically controlled by ROS, running on the ground. Instructions on how to do this are in the documents below.
Instructions:
- How to swarm with Solos and ROS (or anything running APM or PX4 with an IP link, including VTOLs!)
- How to use ROS with Solo
Enjoy!
Comments
Well, they try. Good enough for a $249 billion buyout.
Autonomous multi-MAVs do not require ground stations/off-aircraft computing to fly or achieve their goals. The ground station is a monitoring device for collecting real-time telemetry related to the multi-MAV flight/behavior dynamics. So what happens to the above flight if the ground station fails or you just turn it off? I'm curious.
Not really autonomous as per the statement, more like programatic control from an off-board computing device. Sure hope folks can appreciate the difference between true autonomous multi-MAV flights and programatic network controlled "atoms", similar to MoCap. Am I missing something? It looks like an externalized simulation.
Fantastic! Hopefully we'll get more use cases of ROS and Solo together. This content qualifies nicely to be posted at http://www.ros.org/news/ and get some coverage within the ROS community. @Chris Anderson, would you be interested in doing so? (PM me if that's the case).