Drone Update Frequencies: The drone’s data transmission update frequency depends on parameter. When it is set to , the transmission frequency is set , otherwise transmission frequency is set to . ( is a numeric parameter not Boolean, so use 1 and 0 (not True/False) to set/unset it) Driver Update Frequencies: The driver can operate in two modes: real-time or fixed rate. When the parameter is set to True, the driver publishes any received information instantly. When it is set to False, the driver caches the received data first, then sends them at a fixed rate. This rate is configured via parameter. The default configuration is: and . Please note that if is smaller than the drone’s transmission frequency, some data is going to be lost. The driver’s start-up output shows the current configuration. You can also use command to check the publish rate of the driver. Linear acceleration, angular velocity and orientation of the drone is published to a standard ROS sensor_msgs/Imu message.

The units are all metric and reference frame is set to drone’s frame. The covariance values are specified through , and parameters. For More information, please check the Parameters section. The normalized magnetometer readings are published to topic as a standard ROS geometry_msgs/Vector3Stamped message. New in version 1.4. The driver calculates and publishes Odometry data by integrating velocity estimates reported by the drone (which is based on optical flow). The data is published as nav_msgs/Odometry messages to topic. The corresponding transform is also published as transformation. You can access almost all sensor readings, debug values and status reports sent from the AR-Drone by using . If you set any of following parameters to , their corresponding information will be published to a separate topic. For example if you enable , the driver will publish AR-Drone time information to topic. Most of the names are self-explanatory. Please consult AR-Drone SDK 2.0’s documentation (or source code) for more information.

All parameters are set to False by default. You can use | command for each topic to inspect its published message’s data structure. Both AR-Drone 1.0 and 2.0 are equipped with two cameras. One frontal camera pointing forward and one vertical camera pointing downward. This driver will create three topics for each drone: , and . Each of these three are standard ROS camera interface and publish messages of type image transport. The driver is also a standard ROS camera driver, therefor if camera calibration information is provided either as a set of ROS parameters or through and/or files, calibration information will be also published via topics. Please check the FAQ section for more information. The will always contain the selected camera’s video stream and information. The way that the other two streams work depend on the type of Drone. AR-Drone 1 supports four modes of video streams: Front camera only, bottom camera only, front camera with bottom camera inside (picture in picture) and bottom camera with front camera inside (picture in picture).

According to active configuration mode, the driver decomposes the PIP stream and publishes pure front/bottom streams to corresponding topics. parrot ar drone extended batteryThe topic will include the correct image size.parrot ar drone autopilot AR-Drone 2 does not support PIP feature anymore, therefore only one of or topics will be updated based on which camera is selected at the time.parrot ar drone australia The message also contains information about the special tags that are detected by the drone’s on-board vision processing system. To learn more about the system and the way it works please consult AR-Drone SDK 2.0’s developers guide. These tags are detected on both video cameras on-board at . To configure (or disable) this feature check the Parameters section.

Information about these detected tags are published through the following field of the Legacy Navigation data message. : The number of detected tags. : Vector of types of detected tags (details below) , , , : Vector of position components and size components for each tag. These numbers are expressed in numbers between [0,1000]. You need to convert them back to pixel unit using the corresponding camera’s resolution (can be obtained front topic). : For the tags that support orientation, this is the vector that contains the tag orientation expressed in degrees [0..360). By default, the driver configures the drone to look for using bottom camera and on indoor shells () using front camera. For information on how to extract information from field. Check the FAQ section in the end. is a ROS driver for Parrot AR-Drone 1.0 & 2.0 quadrocopter. This driver is based on official AR-Drone SDK version 2.0.1. is a fork of AR-Drone Brown driver. This package is developed in Autonomy Lab of Simon Fraser University by Mani Monajjemi and other Contributors .

External Links: Source code and issue tracker | ROS wiki page | Support for multiple instances of the driver on a single machine (#98 and ardronelib/#2) Use reception time for video streams (#89) Refactoring of source code and build system Deprecated setting TF root frame (6afa19) Deprecated auto IMU calibration (6afa19) September 3 2014 : 1.3.5: Bug Fixes & Minor Improvements March 14 2014: The binary packages of the driver are now built on ROS build farm. You can install the driver for ROS Indigo, Hydro and Groovy using on Ubuntu. Fully catkinized package (#75 & #79). ARDroneLib has been configured to be built as an external project. ARDroneLib is replaced by the vanilla SDK’s stripped tarball. October 22 2013: Update to Parrot SDK 2.0.1 (Fixes crashes on 2.4.x firmwares, no support for flight recorder (yet). February 13 2013: Support for USB key recording (More info). Motor PWM added to legacy Navdata. Support for zero-command without hovering (More info).

Fully configurable Navdata support (More info). Support for Real-time navdata and video publishing (More info). Support for configurable data publishing rate. November 9 2012: Critical Bug in sending configurations to drone fixed and more parameters are supported (More info). Separate topic for magnetometer data added (More info). September 5 2012: Experimental automatic IMU bias removal. August 27 2012: Thread-safe SDK data access. August 20 2012: The driver is now provides ROS standard camera interface. August 17 2012: Experimental support added. New published topic . August 1 2012: Enhanced message. now includes magnetometer data, barometer data, temperature and wind information for AR-Drone 2. July 27 2012: Support added to the driver as a service July 19 2012: Initial Public Release Sending Commands to AR-Drone Record to USB Stick Where should I go next? Is there any ROS package or stack that can be used as a tutorial/sample to use ardrone_autonomy?