Just a few days ago we had the first flight with Ubuntu Snappy Core with our Linux autopilot Erle-Brain (video  link).

As announced in a previous blog post, together with Canonical and the OSRF we aim to bring an app store for drones based on ROS and the simple "snaps". A new packaging system that Canonical just introduced (something similar to a "zip" file).

Soon we hope to release a microSD image that would allow everyone with a PXF and/or Erle-Brain play with Snappy and start creating drone applications.

Erle Robotics, Canonical and the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) have partnered to bring an "app store" for drones that will use the Robot Operative System (ROS) as its core framework for robotic application development.

We are inspired to support entrepreneurs and inventors focused on life-changing projects. From scientific breakthroughs by autonomous robotic explorers to everyday miracles like home safety and energy efficiency, our world is being transformed by smart machines that can see, hear, move, communicate and sense in unprecedented ways.

Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu and Canonical

 

Ubuntu Core enables our new app store for open robots. That creates a market for innovation and competition in smart robotics, with apps and updates delivered straight from developers to a new class of open, intelligent robots powered by open platforms and open protocols

Brian Gerkey, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation

Through our Linux autopilot Erle-brain that runs APM, we are happy to introduce Erle-Copter as the first Ubuntu Core powered drone. A Linux copter that will support the new Snappy Ubuntu Core which will keep our drones secure and upgraded automatically. 

We are delighted to reveal the Erle-Copter as the world's first Ubuntu Core powered drone that will stay secure automatically and can be upgraded with additional capabilities from the app store. An open platform attracts innovators and experts to collaborate and compete, we are excited to lead the way with open drones for education, research and invention.

Victor Mayoral Vilches, CTO of Erle Robotics

Everyone agrees that developing robotic applications is a difficult task. Brian (CEO of the OSRF) introduced ROS as the LAMP stack for Robotics.

In a few years ROS has changed the robotics field. It has unified Universities and industries around the world, enhanced collaboration, sharing of algorithms and reuse of code. A task that traditionally could take months can be developed within days using ROS. We are true believers of this framework and its possibilities for the future of robotics thereby adopting it as an SDK for an "app store" seems the right choice for us.

We welcome this opportunity to bring a new wave of Linux experts to the drone landscape and keep working to make reliable, Linux-based autopilots.

Hi everyone,

Some of you might have heard about the work we did with BeaglePilot porting APM to Linux both in the hardware and software side. Work we presented at LibreCon 2014 last month. 

I am happy today to announce that after several months of improvements, flight tests and pre-series with manufacturers we are launching a commercial Linux hardware autopilot based on this work: Erle-brain.

Erle-brain is sold at 269 € and puts together a BeagleBone Black (rev. C) and the PixHawk Fire Cape in a single package that weights about 110 grams and includes 25+ sensors. The hardware designs are open to anyone that wishes to improve them.

The autopilot has a 4 GB eMMC flash memory that comes pre-flashed and provides:

• Linux 3.8 kernel compiled with the PREEMPT option (best results we measured)
• Debian Wheezy file system
• ROS Hydromedusa
• mavros ROS package
• APM running natively in Linux (and linked with ROS through mavros)
• preconfigured daemons for launching everything automatically, WiFi dongles support

Erle-brain has been successfully tested in copters, planes and rovers. Thanks to the contribution of many there're drivers for most of the sensor and we keep working hard to provide support for even more accessories. Here are some of the ones we've been playing with:

Expect more to come :).

Besides doing some hardware hacking we've also been putting time in documenting everything. The APM wiki is great and we love it but we wanted to do it our way so we've spent quite a bit of time creating GitBooks that should provide a walkthrough no matter which is your technical level:

We expect to come up with more material in the next months. Thanks everyone for your support and contributions. We will keep working hard to create amazing Linux autopilots.

Best regards,

Víctor.

Some of you might have read the work that Siddharth, Andrew, Philip and myself (supported by many others) have been doing over the last months with APM in Linux through the BeaglePilot project. We are happy to share with you today a paper titled "Towards an Open Source Linux autopilot for drones" (available  here) that has been accepted in LibreCon 2014: Business and Open Technologies Conference that will be held the 11th and 12th of November in Bilbao, Spain.

The paper will be presented by my colleagues from Erle Robotics and they will also be showing our drones flying with APM in Linux. Feel free to drop by and join.

Code availability:

Most of our work with the AP_HAL_Linux has already been merged in the master branch of the main APM repository. We would be happy to address any comments either here or through issues in the main BeaglePilot repository. 

Acknowledgements:

As we point out in the publication, this work would not have been possible without the support of many people. We sincerely want to thank DIYDrones community members for their support, words of encouraging and guidance. We also like convey thanks to Beagleboard.org, Google, 3DRobotics and Erle Robotics for providing financial means and material.

We would like to highlight the importance of having Andrew Tridgell (tridge) as our mentor through all these months. We can only thank him for his support and patience. It has been an amazing experience to work under his supervision and nowadays, more than ever, we deeply respect the work he and many other developers have done to bring up APM to this level. We wish that this contribution is just the first of many that will (hopefully) benefit the community.

I'm happy to share with you today that this afternoon we had the first flight of a copter using ardupilot running in Linux (the evolution of the work performed this summer through the BeaglePilot project on the ardupilot code). It's particularly a pleasure for me to share these news because it's the result of two years trying to fly a copter running Linux (without a companion computer).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyHQpS8XwT0&feature=youtu.be

And a second one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJud5CaxtqE&list=UUZroM1rZYmQQWCt3DOPcHmA

Setup has been done using 3DR Iris and a lot of tape (the Linux board is actually slightly bigger than the PX4 thereby there was no room inside of the hood for it).

Some remarks:

• The autopilot was running at 100 Hz but we are working on a version that runs at 400 Hz.
• It was using only one of the three IMUs included in the autopilot. Using the three of them might lead to a more stable result.
• We have now the three vehicles working on Linux!
• Take in account that i'm a horrible pilot (working on that while i write code ;) )

Future steps:

• BeaglePilot white paper (WIP)
• More work on the AP_HAL_Linux and the Linux kernel
• Flight tests

Regarding the flight tests, i'd like to point out the fantastic attitude that 3DR has had with us, developers, providing all the hardware needed. Hope this serves as an inspiration for other manufacturers.

This work is the result of the effort of many. Particularly the ardupilot dev team, Siddharth Bharat Purohit, Andrew Tridgell and Philip Rowse. It's been fun to walk this path with all of them and down the road it seems there's more ;).

Special thanks to Hugo Boyer for the recordings.

NOTE: The blog post has been renamed from "APM4.0:First copter flight" to "First copter flight using Linux". Thanks for the users that suggested it.

Here are the 5 entities supporting the BeaglePilot project (a.k.a. push the AP_HAL_Linux of ardupilot):

• BeagleBoard.org
• 3D Robotics
• ardupilot
• Erle Robotics
• Google (through the Google Summer of Code)

To this we should add many developers doing a great work. All of it on the behalf of the Open Source Drone community (btw, anyone heard something else about the DroneCode Foundation?).

So how far are we on the road? Well, in the last weeks we've had good progress. We fixed several issues with the SPI bus managing to get better data form the sensors. We even compared it with the APM2.

It seems we have good enough data to run it on a Rover (and maybe on a plane) but it seems like it's still no good for a copter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoPwKTos7B4

We will keep pushing it forward. Thanks to everyone for the support and interest.

Edit: Thankfully, i was pointed out of my mistake speaking solely of the initial 4 entities. Obviously the ardupilot team is one of  the most important component. I sincerely hope that no one got offended and if so, my apologies.

Yesterday at BeaglePilot's weekly meeting we had great progress :):

• We got readings from the MPU6000 (SPI) and MS5611 (SPI) from the AP_Linux_HAL.
• We made ArduPlane and ArduCopter work in the BeagleBone (we didn't finish the tests with APMRover2 but i'd guess it should be fine as well).
• We interfaced MAVProxy with ardupilot running on the BeagleBone :)

There's still much work to do but we are happily moving forward.

In the following weeks you can expect the following to happen:

• More ardupilot hardware tests and drivers will come out. We are happy to have Jimmy Johnson and Daniel Frenzel with us doing a great job coding kernel drivers.
• A new Device Tree for our hardware.
• ROS integration and tests through MAVLink (using the already available mavlink_ros ROS package). We will also look into the possibility of coding a ROS bridge directly into ardupilot.
• Improved PWM and PPM generation using directly the PRU.
• ROS-ardupilot tests and performance report.

We will also be testing the Real-Time capabilities both in hardware and software. Here you have some first results. We will try to continue reporting about it.

After some time following conversations here, I finally decided to introduce Erle, the educational drone:

About

For the last years I've been working in the robotics field, particularly with drones and after some time in several Universities and research centers I found many people (with much passion but) having trouble when it came to get started with them. Technology seemed in most of the cases a black box. Not meant to be used for learning or research. The software they use is in many cases unknown (obviously not in the ardupilot case which is one of the cores of our robot), closed source or not well documented. Given these conditions, how are we going to educate the next generations on this flying technologies? How do you get started programming drones if you don't have $1000+ budget? Which platform allows me to get started with drones without risking a hand?

I wanted to address all these questions so about a year and half ago, from South Korea, I assembled a team and we launched a project called Erle ("bee" in basque language). 

Technology

Erle is a small size, low cost personal drone. Inspired by the BeagleBone development board (a credit-card sized computer), we have designed completely from 0 a small sized flying robot with about 40 sensors, plenty of I/O and processing power for real-time analysis. All of it in a small size Linux flying computer that will bringing robotics to the people. Some of the features we provide are:

• Linux OS (Ubuntu, Debian, Android, ...)
• ROS
• Ardupilot for Linux (work in progress)
• 40 sensors
• microSD card storage
• GPS
• host USB (WiFi dongles, Bluetooth dongles, Monitors, keyboards, ...)
• 92 pins for connecting other devices
• 20 minutes of battery
• Wireless charging (work in progress)

Definitely, we love ardupilot and we are collaborating in the future of it (through the BeaglePilot project) giving Linux computers such as Erle the ability to fly around.

Next steps

We truly believe that drones are about to change our lives (check our 60 seconds pitch) so our mission is to bring robotics to the people with our educational drone. To fulfill this mission we recently started putting up a set of tutorials through the Erle Robotics GitBook, an online resource that will serve as learning and teaching material.

Soon we hope launch a crowdfunding campaign that will allow everyone to access our technology :).

Finally, we are really excited and happy to share that we have recently been selected as one of the 30 top robotics startups worldwide. We will be pushing our educational drone as high as possible and for that purpose i'd like to invite everyone to share your thoughts about our technology.

Thanks in advance!