Parrot AR.Drone is a remote controlled flying quadcopter helicopter built by the French company Parrot. The drone is designed to be controlled by a mobile device with apps available for iOS and Android or the unofficial software available for Windows Phone, Samsung BADA and Symbian devices.
Wikipedia.
There are 4 AR drones in the Lab, including three AR drones 1.0 and one 2.0. The AR drone with the pink hull doesn't work anymore. It seems to be a problem with the ultrasounds.
To just fly the drone, you need to plug the battery in, wait a short while and connect to the wifi network of the drone (named ardrone-something) whith a mobile or tablet. Then the application AR.FreeFlight is userfriendly.
To control it with algorithms using ROS, you can download this ROS package or install it with this command (by replacing kinetic with your own ROS distribution) :
sudo apt install ros-kinetic-ardrone-autonomy
Then you just need to run this command once you are connected to the drone's network :
roslaunch ardrone_autonomy ardrone.launch
Then the connection is done. To take off, you just have to publish an empty message on the topic /ardrone/takeoff and the same message on the topic /ardrone/land to land. In case of emergency, you should stop the motors with the same empty message on the topic /ardrone/reset.
You can know the battery charge and more information by subscribing on the topic /ardrone/navdata, of type Navdata message (installed in ardrone_autonomy package).
Once the drone has taken off, it hovers. To control it, you can send Twist messages on the topic /cmd_vel :
- linear/x to change the pitch,
- linear/y to change the roll,
- linear/z to change the thrust,
- angular/z to change the yaw rate.
You should publish with a rate of at least 50Hz. The range for each component should be between -1.0 and 1.0. I don't really understand why the message is named cmd_vel while it is not the velocity that is command. Moreover, you change the pitch by modifying the linear/x field of the message, even if the pitch rotates around y.
You can find more information in the documentation of ardrone_autonomy.
You can use the ROS package falkor_ardrone. To install it, just follow these instructions :
-
In your workspace, in the
srcfolder, clone the git repository :git clone https://github.com/FalkorSystems/falkor_ardrone.git
-
Go to the root of your workspace and compile :
catkin_make
Finally, you just have to publish Twist messages on the topic /goal_vel while the ardrone_control node is running. To launch it, run this command in a terminal where you have source your workspace (with source /path/to/your/workspace/devel/setup.bash) :
rosrun falkor_ardrone ardrone_control.py
So you can control the AR drone with velocity.
In order to control two or more AR Drones, you can follow this tutorial. The three drones which work in the MRASL have already been hacked to connect to the mrasl_2.4 network. Please see the LAN documentation to learn more about it (and especially find the IP address reserved for the AR Drones).
Unfortunately, the AR Drones can only connect to a 2.4GHz wifi network. And it can't connect to a protected network, that's why there is the mrasl_2.4 network which is secureless.
Once the drone is powered on, connect to it as usual (the ad-hoc network ardrone-something), and launch in a terminal :
echo "./data/wifi.sh" | telnet 192.168.1.1
Do it with all the drones you want to control, and then connect to the mrasl_2.4 network. You should can ping them with their IP address. Then you just have to precise the IP address when you connect to a drone, for instance :
roslaunch ardrone_autonomy ardrone.launch ip:=192.168.1.14