<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">Hi Nate,<div><br></div><div>Sweet! I was looking at the AR.Drone and wondering how easy it would be to get it to support ROS. Much easier now thanks to your work :). I do have a few comments/questions below.</div>
<div><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 4:24 PM, Nate Roney <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:roney.nate@gmail.com">roney.nate@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Greetings everyone,<div><br></div><div>I'd like to share a project I've been working on with the ROS community.</div><div><br></div><div>Some may be familiar with the Parrot AR.Drone: an inexpensive quadrotor helicopter that came out in September. My lab got one, but I was pretty disappointed that it didn't have ROS support out of the box. It does have potential, though, with 2 cameras and a full IMU, so it seemed like a worthwhile endeavor to create a ROS interface for it.</div>
</blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div><br></div><div>So, I would like to announce the first public release of the ROS interface for the AR.Drone. Currently, it allows control of the AR.Drone using a geometry_msgs/Twist message, and I'm working on getting the video feed, IMU data and other relevant state information published as well. Unfortunately, the documentation on how the Drone transmits it's state information is a bit sparse, so getting at the video (anyone with experience converting H.263 to a sensor_msgs/Image, get in touch!) and IMU data are taking more time than I'd hoped, but it's coming along. Keep an eye on the ardrone stack, it will be updated as new features are added.</div>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Can you access the H.263 stream using GStreamer? If so, you ought to be able to use the gscam node (<a href="http://www.ros.org/wiki/gscam">http://www.ros.org/wiki/gscam</a>) to go from GStreamer to ROS images. Sadly, pointing you to the node is about the extent of my experience with gscam, but others might be able to help further if you can verify that GStreamer by itself can read in the video streams.</div>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div><br></div><div>For now, anyone hoping to control their AR.Drone using ROS, this is the package for you! Either send a Twist from your own code, or use the included ardrone_teleop package for manual control.</div></blockquote>
<div><br></div><div>I was looking at your driver docs and noticed a bit of nonstandard coordinate frames going on. First, see <a href="http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0103.html">http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0103.html</a> for an overview of how coordinate systems are defined in ROS. Body frames are generally defined as +X forward, +Y left and +Z up. In that case, what you do with the Twist is a bit non-standard; linear.x should be forward/back, linear.y would be left/right and linear.z would be up/down, with angular.z as yaw if the AR.Drone's body frame was following the standard ROS convention for coordinate systems. Any reason why you went with the Twist interpretation as documented on the wiki at <a href="http://www.ros.org/wiki/ardrone_driver">http://www.ros.org/wiki/ardrone_driver</a> as opposed to a more standard interpretation?</div>
<div><br></div><div>Also, what sort of units are on those components? meters/s for the linear ones and rad/s for the angular?</div><div><br></div><div>- Eric</div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div>
<br></div><div>You can find the ardrone_driver and ardrone_teleop packages on the experimental-ardrone branch of siue-ros-pkg, which itself never had a proper public release. This repository represents the Mobile Robotics Lab at SIUE, and contains a few utility nodes I have developed for some of our past projects, with more packages staged for addition to the repository once we have time to document them properly for a formal release.</div>
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://github.com/siue-cs/siue-ros-pkg" target="_blank">http://github.com/siue-cs/siue-ros-pkg</a></div>
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://github.com/siue-cs/siue-ros-pkg/tree/experimental-ardrone" target="_blank">http://github.com/siue-cs/siue-ros-pkg/tree/experimental-ardrone</a></div><div><br></div><div>I'm hopeful that someone will find some of this useful. Feel free to contact me with any questions!</div>
<div><br></div><div>Cheers,</div><div>Nate Roney</div>
<br>------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
Download new Adobe(R) Flash(R) Builder(TM) 4<br>
The new Adobe(R) Flex(R) 4 and Flash(R) Builder(TM) 4 (formerly<br>
Flex(R) Builder(TM)) enable the development of rich applications that run<br>
across multiple browsers and platforms. Download your free trials today!<br>
<a href="http://p.sf.net/sfu/adobe-dev2dev" target="_blank">http://p.sf.net/sfu/adobe-dev2dev</a><br>_______________________________________________<br>
ros-users mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:ros-users@lists.sourceforge.net">ros-users@lists.sourceforge.net</a><br>
<a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ros-users" target="_blank">https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ros-users</a><br>
<br>_______________________________________________<br>
ros-users mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:ros-users@code.ros.org">ros-users@code.ros.org</a><br>
<a href="https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users" target="_blank">https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users</a><br>
<br></blockquote></div><br>