Pick and drop demo

Pick and Drop is a demonstration of object transportation using a drone in an indoor setup. The control can be either via a human pilot who controls the drone using a joystick to fly the drone, pick, transport and drop the object, or fully autonomous using vision feedback.

The following setup is assumed.

  • Indoor localization system (optitrack)
  • A drone that is equipped with a PX4 autopilot and an arduino-controlled customized gripper.
  • An object that is magnetic (can be picked by a permanent magnet)
  • A ROS-compatible joystick for manual control
  • A ROS-compatible camera for vision feedback, for autonomous mission
  • ROS Kinetic, Ubuntu 16 on ODROID XU4, or a similar onboard computer

Installation

  • Make sure you install the required dependencies above
  • Clone this package into your ~/catkin_ws/src and build it
  • The arduino code that controls the gripper is in the gripper_joystick folder.

Experiment

  • Place markers rigidly on the drone, and define a rigid body in Motive
  • Stream the rigid body info using VRPN, and make sure that Up axis is the z-axis
  • It is assumed that you have an onboard computer which runs mavros, which can be used to feed the rigidbody pose from motion capture information to PX4.

Note

Always double check that you can hover the drone in POSITION flight mode, before you execute the experiments in OFFBOARD mode.

Manual control (Drone 1)

  • Make sure that you give the joystick permissions (we used Logitech F710).
sudo chmod a+rw /dev/input/js0 # Check the input device number
  • The right analog stick is for x/y (position) motion. The left stick is for height. The red button is for disarm. The green button is for autoland. The down button on D-Pad is for dropping, if the object is picked (detected by the button on the gripper).
_images/f710.png
  • Run the following command on the onboard computer. Double check the addresses for joystick, arduino, FCU, Ground Control Station, and name of the Rigid Body from Mocap system.
roslaunch pick_drop_demo start_manual_test.launch

Autonomous mission (Drone 2)

  • Run the following command on the onboard computer. That will start the autonomous mission with takeoff action to 1m height. Double check the addresses for arduino, FCU, Ground Control Station, and name of the Rigid Body from Mocap system.
roslaunch pick_drop_demo start_autonomous_mission.launch

Contributors

Main contributors are Asmaa AlSaggaf and Mohamed Abdelkader.