Onboard computer communication ROS package

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pihka
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Posts: 1
Joined: Thu May 05, 2022 7:44 pm

Onboard computer communication ROS package

Post by pihka »

Hi everyone,

I am looking into using a Crazyflie flight controller together with a BigQuad deck. The drone is planned to have an onboard computer, sending commands to the Crazyflie.

From the documentation of cflib, I can see that setting up UART communication is possible, and an example with Raspberry Pi is given here: https://www.bitcraze.io/documentation/r ... munication.

Has Bitcraze or some third party created a ROS-wrapper for this kind of communication with UART via cflib-python? To me it seems that the existing ROS packages for Crazyflie 2.X all communicate directly with the flightcontroller via the radios and not via UART.

The setup is much like using a Pixhawk where MAVROS would be used to read e.g. IMU data from the flightcontroller and also send commands to the flightcontroller. So put in another way - is there something like MAVROS for Crazyflie out there?

I am interested in this as we have a couple of Crazyflie flightcontrollers, using them currently only for a course.

Kind regards
Peter Karstensen
kimberly
Bitcraze
Posts: 1050
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2018 11:13 am

Re: Onboard computer communication ROS package

Post by kimberly »

Hi!

That is indeed true, although this functionality is community contributed and haven't been tested heavily. I also noticed that it hasn't been converted to the latest kbuild framework, of which I made a ticket for now.

We don't have a ROS wrapper for this unfortunately, and indeed the existing ROS packages that are maintained by the community only use Crazyradio based communication.

We have come across a lab that is currently working on interfacing with the Raspberry pi, but are trying out the new CPX functionality of the Crazyflie (I wrote about it a bit in this blogpost). This is the mcu to mcu protocol we developed for the AIdeck, and is probably something we are more likely to continue with. Still all very in development phase, but if you like trying it out? This is probably a better candidate for a future ROS package.
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