As you can see from the logo from today's release of the Robot Operating System "Jade Turtle" version, drones are a big part of ROS's future. Although ROS started with robot arms and research robots, the migration of drone platforms such as Solo to Linux means that they can work with ROS, too. That means that the hundreds of powerful AI, simulation, computer vision and pathfinding packages that have been developed on ROS can now work on APM-powered drones, too.
The forthcoming ROS 2.0 is designed for mobile and distributed robots such as drones, where you can't assume that communications links are always high-bandwidth, low-latency and even present. So it will work with comms links that sometimes break, and will automatically re-establish them.
As part of this, the Open Source Robotics Foundation, which creates ROS, has joined the Dronecode Foundation and is now working with the APM dev team on integration of APM and ROS on the next-gen 3DR autopilots.
Early examples of similar efforts include the Erle Robotics drone platform, which combines APM and ROS on a Linux-based autopilot.
This is, in short, the future. The worlds of academic robotics research, linux and drones are now merging. This is going to be amazing.
Comments
Glad hearing 3DR is moving to ROS :)! Indeed exciting times!
Thomas you can already take first steps with ROS and the PXF. We are slowly releasing ROS packages such as this one that should help build higher level behaviors.
Cheers,
Interesting that the Lily drone that went viral a couple weeks ago was developed on the PX4 platform with ROS.
ROS Jade ended up breaking my Ubuntu 14.04 system, bricked bash AND despite all the documentation reads all over the site, was not able to find out WHY. Great idea but better documentation and an actual support system (like oh I don't know .... a forum?) would be a great to have in the future. For now, giving up on this.
@Chris,
I have two Beagle Bone Blacks loaded with Debian Linux and one Pixhawk Fire Cape so I am ready to move into the next phase of navigation controller development.
Regards,
TCIII AVD
"is now working with the APM dev team on integration of APM and ROS on the next-gen 3DR autopilots."
Does it mean Pixhawk 2 which is on Solo is going to be support this?
Interesting times