Beyond just full blown aerial autonomy stacks, there might be a lot to learn from existing other popular ROS packages built for either drone platforms popularly used in research as driver packages or flight controller companion packages. The motivation here is to add these to the ROS-aerial information landscape as another list either as driver packages for hardware platforms in our list or as a collection of existing popular implementations with some aspects of design already solved to help people not reinvent the wheel.
A few packages that I’ve seen in the past or have come across:
Ah yes I would say so! The repo doesn’t have the right pages for this one yet. I had non-autonomy packages in that list before but I changed the name to autopilot suites. But that leave indeed a big gap in between.
So if you’d like to contribute these, I would propose to make a new page called ‘middleware_and_drivers.md’. Then we can also add the XRCE-dss and zenoh efforts in there later, which is actually a bit more lower level, but these driver packages also enables communication between the autopilot and the companion computer.
The trajectory controller and clover framework I would argue that those should be added to the autonomy page. Perhaps it is not a full autonomy stack perse but it does something extra than just communicating topics to the autopilots. So they can be added to the list (if you are not sure what their features are, you can just add question marks instead of the x’s or check’s.
Also, we should also add clover drone to hardware! Seems like an interesting platform for sure!
Would you like to contribute these to the repo yourself? We can do it too but it’s nicer if your name is attached to the commits so you’ll have eternal glory for your contribution
Haha sure, in the absence of sunshine I’d love to bask in the glory of my PRs to ROS-Aerial instead. Sure I’ll raise a PR.
I was basically coming at this from thinking how I would build a custom stack, I’d probably defer to these kind of packages as inspiration to at least get a more wholesome view even if some implementation details may be tightly coupled to specific hardware.
Yeah… that is unfortunately the case still and the reason why so many packages existed. This is also a bit of the reason why we started the Aerial-ros group to hopefully be able to harmonize this all in the future. But I don’t expect that to happen this year though, this will take some time!
But happy that you are able to share your research. This way others that need to make their own package can find these resources a bit easier.
