In this post, I show how to get started: How to install ROS, how to make it fly, how to use a joystick using ROS and how to use OpenCV with ROS camera feeds. I also explain how to run ROS with Linux Mint. As some might have noticed, I initially wrote a post showing how to use the tools offered by Parrot to develop some program in C or C++ to make the AR.I suggest you see this post first if you want to know how to use usb joysticks on linux. Fortunately, I was told about ROS a couple of months ago so I did not start to follow this tedious path only to make the drone fly by itself. I have recently been in a robotics conference in Toronto where I saw a lot of research groups using the AR.So I teamed up with a strong guy named Sebastien Audet and we began to learn how to use ROS with the AR.In this article, I will present everything we have found on the web and I will show the code that we implemented. First of all, If you want to install ROS, you will need a linux OS. Here’s the installation website.

The main supported platform is Ubuntu, so I suggest you use Ubuntu. Since Linux Mint is very close to Ubuntu, and because we prefer Mint over Ubuntu, we used linux Mint. The installation guide for ROS is pretty much complete, so I suggest you follow it. The only problem for mint is that you need to override some export variables so ROS thinks you’re using Ubuntu. To do that, you first install ROS. Then, you need to type the following bash command: This will show you the Ubuntu version running underneath your distribution of Linux Mint. For me, it was 12.04 (Ubuntu precise 12.04.2 LTS). With this information, you will append the following at the end of your .bashrc file. Note that I installed ROS fuerte, so you need to change “fuerte” to whatever version you installed. The first line will with make you load ros commands in your terminal. The next one will tell your ROS installation to act like your were using Ubuntu. The third will define where to go when you enter the command roscd.

The last one will append to the ROS path list the path of your system when you will have ROS packages to compile, so any ROS project should be in a path in this export variable. When this is done, you will need ardrone_autonomy and ardrone_tutorials. I suggest you go there to install everything right, but here’s a list of the commands to bash in: Ok so now everything should go all right. If not, google the error message, or contact me, I might have forgotten something. Some ROS commands might return errors like this one: In that case, you have to force the OS override by adding the option to the command, e.g.: Now if you just want to fly the drone with a keyboard, here the command: But if you’re here, it’s because you want to use a joystick (or nothing at all, like I want to do) and to use OpenCV instead of Qt in order to work easily with the image stream, right? It’s time to create a small project in python. In your manifest.xml file, placed at the root of your project, write:

Just like in ardrone_tutorials, you should have a launch file. In it, it’s pretty straight forward to set the multiple flight parameters as well as the joystick parameters. black ops 2 rc doke for saleJust read the example in ardrone_tutorials and you should make it work quickly. airsoft uav drone for saleI refer to my previous post if you want to know what are the buttons and axis values from your gamepad.parrot ar drone range mod At that point, you should easily be able to make your gamepad work with the drone by doing these changes to joystick_controller.py like changing the button and axis default values. parrot ar drone will not hover

When this is done, just run the following command: Now, how do you use OpenCV instead of Qt (yeah, the basic example uses Qt). You need to know that using both at the same time will not work well, because that Qt’s thread seems to conflicts with OpenCV, so OpenCV will crash randomly if inside the execution loop of Qt. Found that somewhere googling around, and it solved our problem perfectly.parrot ar drone police kit Here’s how to convert ROS images to OpenCV images and the other way around. ar drone 2 de chez parrotThis example is modified from ROS’ website, so go there if you ever need more details. And finally, here’s a a quick code to make ROS work without this Qt loop. First you remove the Qt timers and such from drone_video_display.py: And the following gets rid of the main Qt loop in a stupid way, but it will work as a good start point.

The loop is in the main of joystick_controller.py :Now compile your project and launch it using the same bash command as before. ROS will do the rest and you will be able to make your drone fly while streaming images to OpenCV. CV Drone (= OpenCV + AR. Copyright (C) 2016 puku0x CV Drone is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of EITHER: (1) The GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Freeeither version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. The text of the GNU Lesser General Public License is included with this library in the (2) The BSD-style license that is included with this library in This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. cvdrone-license-LGPL.txt and cvdrone-license-BSD.txt for more details. Please unzip "cvdrone-master.zip" into an arbitrary directory.