tiers / drone-racing

Gazebo simulator with Hector quadrotor for training drone racing. The races are later done with a Tello drone controlled via ROS.

TIERS Drone Racing

Gazebo simulator with Hector quadrotor to train for the TIERS drone racing challenge.

The races are later done with a Tello drone controlled via ROS, as part of the master course Perception and Navigation in Robotics.

Get Started

This instructions are for Ubuntu 18.04 with ROS Melodic already installed.

Clone this repo into your workspace (the code below creates a new catkin workspace named drone_racing_ws in your home folder):

mkdir -p  ~/drone_racing_ws/src && cd ~/drone_racing_ws/src
git clone --recursive https://github.com/TIERS/drone_racing.git

Install dependencies

sudo apt install ros-melodic-geographic-msgs ros-melodic-hector-gazebo-plugins ros-melodic-hector-sensors-*

We also need some Gazebo models that we use for the virtual race scenario. You have two opcions here, download the full Gazebo models database, or just a few that we provide to be able to run this simulations. Either way, first create a folder where Gazebo can find your models:

mkdir -p ~/.gazebo/models

Option 1: Full Gazebo Database

Download Gazebo models database (we actually only use a few of them, this will download the full database with approx. 400MB of basic models):

git clone https://github.com/osrf/gazebo_models/ ~/.gazebo/models

Read more about the Gazebo database here.

Option 2: Minimal amount of models

Copy to the same folder the models included in this repo (change the path if you cloned the repo somewhere else):

cp -r ~/drone_racing_ws/src/drone_racing/gazebo_models/* ~/.gazebo/models/

Build the workspace

We recommend using catkin build. Install it if needed with

sudo apt install python-catkin-tools

and then run

cd ~/drone_racing_ws
catkin init
catkin build

Build the uav messages with

catkin build hector_uav_msgs

Run the simulator

Run the simulator with

source ~/drone_racing_ws/devel/setup.bash
roslaunch tiers_drone_racing hector_dronerace.launch

Start the motors in another terminal window/tab:

source ~/drone_racing_ws/devel/setup.bash
rosservice call /enable_motors "enable: true"

In order to control the UAV with keyboard teleop, install it with

sudo apt install ros-melodic-teleop-twist-keyboard

if you don't have it yet, and run the teleop node in a separate terminal window/tab:

rosrun tiers_drone_racing tello_controller.py 

Camera view

Install the image_view package:

sudo apt install ros-melodic-image-view

rosrun image_view image_view image:=/camera/rgb/image_raw

Contact

For any questions, write to [email protected].

Visit us at https://tiers.utu.fi