Drone WayPointer README

"Drone WayPointer" is a ROS package that provides a UI to allow for remote control of the Parrot AR Drone. It is developed in C++ with qt-ros and the Qt4 Development FrameWork.
It is designed to work with the ROS - Fuerte and it uses the the ardrone_autonomy driver (Fuerte-devel Branch). It has so far only been tested on the tum_simulator and not on the actual drone.
The main functionalities it provides is camera streams of front or bottom cameras of the drone, button and slider control of the drone XYZ velocities, control using waypoints and waypoint commands, pose estimation using simple dead-reckoning and measurement and image recording functionalities.

Installation

• You need Ubuntu 12.04 and ROS - Fuerte. Instructions to install ROS - Fuerte can be found at the ROS Wiki page.

• ardrone_autonomy package : Get the code in your personal ROS stacks folder and cd to it. This folder should be in your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH. Then build the driver and the package :

  $ roscd
  $ git clone -b fuerte-devel https://github.com/AutonomyLab/ardrone_autonomy.git
  $ rosstack profile && rospack profile
  $ roscd ardrone_autonomy
  $ ./build_sdk.sh
  $ rosmake ardrone_autonomy
  

  More detailed instructions can be found at ardrone_autonomy fuerte-devel branch.

• Set-up Drone Waypointer : Get the code from this repository, and use the branch of your preference. The student-edition branch will allways be outdated compared to the master branch. You also need to install the qt-ros dependency :

  $ roscd
  $ sudo apt-get install ros-fuerte-qt-ros
  $ git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/dronewaypointer/code dronewaypointer-code
  $ rosmake drone_waypointer
  

• Finally, if you would like to use tum_simulator, you can install it by doing the following :
  Get and build the ardrone_helpers package:

  $ roscd
  $ svn checkout https://svncvpr.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/cvpr-ros-pkg/trunk/ardrone_helpers
  $ rosmake ardrone_joystick
  $ rosmake joy
  

  Get and build the tum_simulator package:

  $ roscd
  $ git clone https://github.com/tum-vision/tum_simulator.git
  $ rosmake cvg_sim_gazebo_plugins
  $ rosmake message_to_tf
  $ rosmake tum_simulator
  

More detailde instructions can be found at tum_simulator.

Usage

Simulation

If you want to use Drone Waypointer with a simulation, you can use roslaunch to run one of the pre-defined environments inside the tum_simulation package and then rosrn to run the Drone WayPointer binary on a different console than the one of the simulator:

    $ roslaunch cvg_sim_test (name of desired launch file)
    $ rosrun drone_waypointer drone_waypointer

You then "hit" the Connect button and can start using the interface. More details about using Drone WayPointer can be found in the 'Drone-waypointerTutorial.pdf'