Download and integrate ROS directly into Crazyflie VM

[thanhvu94]

Hello everyone,

I'm using Windows 7 64 bit, which is not supported by ROS. For Crazyflie Virtual Machine, I checked that the version of Ubuntu is 14.04 (which is also not supported by ROS). I want to upgrade it to version 16.04 so I can download ROS and Crazyflie ros packages. Is it possible, or will it damage the other Crazyflie softwares in VM I'm using or not?

Is there possibly another way to work with ROS without doing dual-boot (Linux and Window) for my computer?

Thank you

[arnaud]

We have usually avoided it but it is possible to run ROS in a virtual machine. It has been done and there has been report on this forum that it works for controlling crazyflie(s) in the Loco Positioning System.

You can try to upgrade to Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) the current virtual machine. It should not break anything and if it does you can always re-install the virtual machine. You can also use the snapshot functionality of Virtualbox: do a snapshot just before the upgrade, if anything breaks you can come back to this snapshot.

If you want to restart from a new VM you can install xubuntu 16.04 in a new virtualbox virtual machine.

We are planing on upgrading the VM to Ubuntu 16.04 but there is still some problem doing so, my hope is that I can soon produce a VM 2017.04 based on Ubuntu 16.04.

[thanhvu94]

I want to use ros to collect data from VICON camera system (a very popular system used in research). I intend to use Rasperry Pi 3 to install ROS on that. Is there any problem to communicate with Crazyflie (send/receive data) via Rasperry Pi 3?

[arnaud]

There is no problem I can foresee for communicating with Crazyflie from a Raspberry pi 3. The only problem is that things like RVIZ might not run very well on a raspberry pi.

I am curious of your result so it would be great if you can keep up updated on your progress, if things works well in a rapberrypi 3.

[whoenig]

The crazyflie_ros stack should work on ARM (only subsets tested). However, the VICON DataStream SDK is not available for ARM-based platforms, so you can't use vicon_bridge. You can use VRPN, but won't get all the features and slightly lower performance.

[thanhvu94]

The crazyflie_ros stack should work on ARM (only subsets tested). However, the VICON DataStream SDK is not available for ARM-based platforms, so you can't use vicon_bridge. You can use VRPN, but won't get all the features and slightly lower performance.

I want to use vicon_bridge to collect the information about XYZ position of 2 objects in the VICON arena at at least frequency 100Hz (it is better if I can get the angles also). Is it possible using VRPN?

[whoenig]

This is possible with VRPN. Just the advanced features (latency estimation, direct access to the markers etc.) are not available. You can use http://wiki.ros.org/vrpn_client_ros; VICON Tracker has the VRPN server enabled by default.

[thanhvu94]

This is possible with VRPN. Just the advanced features (latency estimation, direct access to the markers etc.) are not available. You can use http://wiki.ros.org/vrpn_client_ros; VICON Tracker has the VRPN server enabled by default.

Can I use this package instead: https://github.com/ethz-asl/ros_vrpn_client instead of https://github.com/clearpathrobotics/vrpn_client_ros provided by your website?

Honestly, I cannot find any tutorial on Internet to enable and get position data from VICON through this package. Do you have any good reference that can be used for those who are not very familiar with ROS code?

[whoenig]

I assume you can, but I didn't try the ETH package myself. VRPN itself is a standard protocol and both ROS packages use the default implementation, so there should be no issue.

There is nothing you need to do on the VICON side, except having Tracker running, and a working network connection (with open ports!) between your VICON Tracker machine and your ROS machine/robot. Then just follow the package instruction on how to launch one of the nodes. They will add additional frames into your tf-tree (see http://wiki.ros.org/tf for details and tutorials on how to visualize the data). The VRPN "object" name is exactly the object name you define in VICON Tracker (and needs to be known).