QuadSoftware

Quadrotor Platform

About

This page presents instructions and software for ISR Quadrotors. This vehicle includes a Pandaboard Computer that is not recommended to do heavy computing, and so it is only appropriate to run the ROS drivers for the hardware (motors and sensors). So the suggested architecture is to use an external laptop for the main software, connecting via Wi-Fi to the quadrotor. The driver nodes can be remotely launched using roslaunch.

Sensors

• Laser Range Finder: Hokuyo URG-04LX-UG01
• Optical Flow: PX4Flow Smart Camera
• IMU:
  • Accelerometer: ADXL335
  • Magnetometer: HMC5843
  • Gyroscopes: ADXRS620

Software

Prerequisites

ROS Fuerte with the following packages:

• laser_drivers
• mav_tools
• scan_tools
• hector_common

ROS Source Code

The source code can be found here: quad_ros.tar.gz.

Usage

Packages

• quad_drivers -- contains the main drivers (to run on Pandaboard).
• quad_launch -- contains some launch files.

Nodes

• imu_parser -- Reads data from IMU.
• quad_link -- Establish connection between vehicle and laptop.
• quad_status -- Reads some important data from vehicle.
• laser_height -- Calculate the height of the quadrotor with LRF.

Published topics

• /scanCenter (sensor_msgs/LaserScan) -- Laser Range Finder measurements.
• /imu/data (sensor_msgs/Imu) -- IMU data.
• /quad_height/height_to_base (mav_msgs/Height) -- Height of quadrotor (in m).
• /quad_status/status (quad_status/Status) -- voltage (in V), RC status, Motors ON/OFF, ExternalCtrl ON/OFF and RunTime.

Examples

An example of a launch file to launch all quad nodes is on package quad_launch.

NOTE: you need to modify these launch file in order to launch the nodes remotely.