Use of drone simulation tools

This tool pack is to simulate a single drone to test controllers using Mavros.

Packages required

• PX4
• Arducopter not tested
• mavros for communicating with drones in ROS

Packages

• fake_qualisy for producing vicon/qualisys information
• mocap_to_mavros for feeding vision pose information to drone
• drone_simulation_tools provides launch files to call fake_qualisy and mocap_to_mavros

Use cases

1. PX4 in Gazebo + fake VICON + onboard nodes (mavros + mocap_to_mavros)

This is to simulate a drone with PX4 firmware in Gazebo and a VICON system that communicate with mavros.

In other words, it porvides a simulation envrionment for using VICON in reality: fake VICON takes drone information from Gazebo and publishs to ROS topics.

By the way, feeding vision pose information to drone with mocap_to_mavros is because PX4 only allow OFFBOARD when vision_pose is feeded.

    roslaunch drone_simulation_tools drone_px4_onboard.launch

Then, we should see

which show topics and nodes

• gazebo simulates a PX4 drone
• node vicon_fake from fake_qualisy subscribe to gazebo and pushes drone pose info to /vicon/drone
• node mocap_to_mavros from mocap_to_mavros feeds drone pose infor to /mavros/vision_pose
• mavros builds communication between ROS and drone

2. fake VICON + mocap_to_mavros

This is to provide a faked VICON that we can specify the pose of drone.

It can be used for tests before flights:

• connect a drone to an onboard computer
• run fake VICON with custermised pose and mocap_to_mavros on the onboard computer
• test controllers on the onboard computer

1. fake VICON with predefined pose

fake a vicon system that publishes a drone's pose by

    roslaunch fake_qualisys fake_vicon_experiment.launch

where the pose can be set in fake_vicon_experiment.launch

  <!-- drone position -->  
  <arg name="drone_post_x" default="0"/>
  <arg name="drone_post_y" default="0"/>
  <arg name="drone_post_z" default="1"/>
  <!-- drone attitude in quaterion -->
  <arg name="drone_att_q_x" default="0"/>
  <arg name="drone_att_q_y" default="0"/>
  <arg name="drone_att_q_z" default="0"/>
  <arg name="drone_att_q_w" default="1"/>

2. use onboard node to map mocap to mavros

    roslaunch mocap_to_mavros_sim mocap_to_mavros_sim.launch