At Erle Robotics we believe that Gazebo is the key tool for the future development of robotics.In order to help our community and users to simplify the process of algorithm with flying robots We’ve decided to put together a series about how to simulate Erle-Copter with ROS/Gazebo. Here are the first four episodes:

Episode 1: How to launch the simulator once the environment is set up

Episode 2: Testing ArduCopter flight modes

Episode 3: Automatic take off and land using ROS

Episode 4: Overriding the radio control using MAVROS

In addition to this we have created documentation where we explain how to go through the whole process.  We also recommend having a look to the series of videos that explain how to get started with the Robot Operating System (ROS).

“Start discovering the world of robotics with Erle Robotics.”

Many thanks to Alex Buyval for creating the initial Arducopter simulation on Gazebo. Also many thanks to Aurélien Roy and Maxime Lafleur to continue his work.

Erle Robotics continue working towards improving ROS support and creating packages that people can use to build applications.

APMCopter and ROS (roscore and mavros) is running on Erle-Brain. Through mavros someone can have control of the autopilot from ROS. Also it's possible to see how the values are changing in APM Planner.

The following shows a simple interface where is possible to visualize the flight mode and the state of the drone (armed or disarmed). It's possible to change the state of the flight mode using the comboBox. The code is available in github[1]

Also it's possible to override the radio control, the virtual joysticks are configure in mode 2 (left joystick: throttle and yaw,right: pitch and roll).
In the following video we explain how to use a color filter to control a quadcopter. In the first part of the video It explains how to tune the color filter in a color and in the second part how the controller is working, the controller can change throttle, pitch and roll. The code is available in github[2].
We'd love to hear your opinion about which ROS abstractions you'd like to see in Erle-Brain.

Regards,

[1] Source Code: https://github.com/erlerobot/ros_erle_teleoperation

[2] Source Code: https://github.com/erlerobot/ros_erle_computervision_teleoperation

Hi all!

I want to announce that ErleRobotics have integrated SSH in DroidPlanner. We are working with the BeagleBone+PXF we find this feature really interesting because we can launch, kill or do whatever we want with the autopilot directly in the core.

If you want to know more about this you can visit the following URL [1].

Thanks your time!

[1] http://erlerobotics.com/blog/ssh-connection-droidplanner/