[ros-users] ROS Interface for AR.Drone Quadrotor

[Jack O'Quin]

Nate,

This looks like a cool device, definitely interesting for robotics
work. Thanks for making a ROS package.

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 9:02 AM, Nate Roney <nateroney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The units are degrees for the forward/backward and left/right tilt. These
> control the percentage of the maximum tilt (which is currently 30 degrees).
> Obviously, the more tilt, the faster it goes. I've found that anything more
> than 25 degrees actually drives the drone to the ground, so I'm thinking of
> adding a limit, and/or adding a rosparam allowing the change of the max
> angle.

Note that REP 103 also specifies angles in radians:

  http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0103.html#units

As noted, there can be exceptions, domains where the default
conventions are not appropriate. We should not be pedantic about it. A
recent example came up with the GPS message discussion. Latitude and
longitude should be expressed in degrees, not in radians.

I made some similar mistakes in a couple of our autonomous vehicle
messages [[http://www.ros.org/wiki/art_msgs]]. I now wish I'd gotten
them right to begin with. The standards were not so clearly spelled
out back then. In my experience, it is a lot of extra work to change
messages later (more due to bag migration than to fixing all the
references).

Regards,
-- 
 joq