Drone Following Project #12: ROS and ardrone_tutorials

Today, during my lunch break I connected my Drone to ROS and gave it a whirl. This made signficantly easier by MikeHamer's ardrone_tutorials repo. In fact, I'd say that this is a great fit for any hobbyist, besides the fact that you have to set up and configure ROS in Linux (though I heard thay make preset virtual machines for this).

Whereas I'm using to breaking my neck attempting to connect to the Velodyne or other ethernet based utilities, connecting to the Drone was a synch. Perhaps this is due to the fact that it has own wi-fi connection, and you don't have to fool with all of that other garbage. Anyways, I managed to quickly get outdoor_controls.launch working. It pops up a handy camera feed GUI, and from this point you can use WASD style controls to steer the drone in all directions. More importantly, we can use rostopic to navigate the many, many topics that the ardrone_driver node produces... Thankfully, it is fairly well organized. There is a direct nav topic, IMU topic, a set for each camera, and even one for an emergency reset. I suggest you peruse ardrone_autonomy's readme for more info-- it is really well written. Below you can see some of my screenshots from my flights, along with the data produced.

Sorry for no IRL pictures of the drone in action. I'm sure we'll get enough of that later. Now on to deciphering those topics, and learning to put them in code!