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An open-source navigation system for micro aerial vehicles

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Abstract

This paper presents an open-source indoor navigation system for quadrotor micro aerial vehicles (MAVs), implemented in the ROS framework. The system requires a minimal set of sensors including a planar laser range-finder and an inertial measurement unit. We address the issues of autonomous control, state estimation, path-planning, and teleoperation, and provide interfaces that allow the system to seamlessly integrate with existing ROS navigation tools for 2D SLAM and 3D mapping. All components run in real time onboard the MAV, with state estimation and control operating at 1 kHz. A major focus in our work is modularity and abstraction, allowing the system to be both flexible and hardware-independent. All the software and hardware components which we have developed, as well as documentation and test data, are available online.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the U.S. Army Research Office under Grant No. W911NF-09-1-0565 and U.S. National Science Foundation under Grants No. CNS-0619577 and No. IIS-0644127

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, USA

    Ivan Dryanovski

  2. Electrical Engineering Department, CUNY City College, Convent Avenue & 140th Street, New York, NY, 10031, USA

    Roberto G. Valenti & Jizhong Xiao

Authors
  1. Ivan Dryanovski
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  2. Roberto G. Valenti
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  3. Jizhong Xiao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ivan Dryanovski.

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Appendix: Software and hardware resources

Appendix: Software and hardware resources

This appendix details the relevant open-source software and hardware components of the system.

The software implementation of the system presented in this paper can be obtained free and open-source online at http://robotics.ccny.cuny.edu/CityFlyer. The software is organized according to the ROS build system of stacks and packages, where a package is a unit of software responsible for a certain task, and a stack is a collection of functionally related packages.

  • asctec_drivers: Firmware for the AscTec Autopilot architecture, and AscTec Pelican models. Firmware includes the sensor fusion and control software, which are hardware-independent.

  • scan_tools: Software for processing laser scanner data. Tools include orthogonal projection, scan matching, and various utilities.

  • mav_tools: Software for MAV-specific navigation tasks and interfaces. Also includes high-level launch files for the CityFlyer project.

Each stack and package has a dedicated web page with instructions, available at http://www.ros.org/wiki

The open-source hardware consist of mirror mounts required for the height estimation module. We provide adapters for the Hokuyo URG-04LX-UG01 and Hokuyo UTM-30LX laser scanner models. The parts can be built using a 3D printer.

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Dryanovski, I., Valenti, R.G. & Xiao, J. An open-source navigation system for micro aerial vehicles. Auton Robot 34, 177–188 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-012-9318-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-012-9318-8

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