Table of Contents
Controlling the Ar.Drone with the Brown-ROS Package
Introduction
In this tutorial you will learn how to fly the ARDrone from Parrot using ROS. ROS(Robotics Operating System) is an open source tool for creating robot applications. It saves a lot of development time and in the same time help to create robust real time softwares for ones project.
Before you take this tutorial, I suggest you to go through the basics of ROS and also to install ROS itself here. This tutorial uses ROS-ELECTRIC and the OS used is Ubuntu 10.10. After you downloaded ROS go here and download the Brown-ros stack which could be done by opening up a terminal and enter:
svn checkout http://brown-ros-pkg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/brown-ros-pkg-read-only
Necessary Packages
Before we go for the test of ARDRONE make sure you have the following packages.In a terminal, type:
roscd ardrone_brown
Make sure you are taken to the respective package's folder if not you have to download the corresponding package.Likewise enter(in the same terminal)
roscd drone_teleop roscd image_view
Making The Package
Now the packages are at place we are going to make it and create a driver file.
Step 1: Go to /brown-ros-pkg-read-only/experimental/ardrone_brown (using the terminal) Step 2: In the terminal enter the following commands(one after the other):
sh build_sdk.sh cmake . rosmake
Make sure you receive 0 failures at the end of rosmake. There are possibilities that you may run into some problems if you are plan to use ROS-Fuerte(latest version of ROS). I personally have not tried that yet.
Step 3: If everything went well right you should be seeing a driver file named “ardrone_driver” in the bin folder.
Interface your computer with the ARDRONE
Step 1: Switch on the ARDRONE and wait for the led lights on the ardrone to turn green Step 2: Open up a terminal(ctrl+alt+T) and enter :
roscore
Step 3:Open up an other terminal and enter:
rosrun ardrone_brown ardrone_driver
Step 4: Again in a new terminal enter:
rosrun drone_teleop drone_teleop.py
Step 5:Open up a terminal and enter :
rosrun image_view image_view image:=/ardrone/image_raw
This should give a video feed from the ardrone
Step 6: If all of the above steps are successful, you should be able to control the drone using the drone_teleop portal. Here is a video of the ARDRONE being controlled using the Brown ROS package