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An Autonomous Companion UAV for the SpaceBot Cup Competition 2015

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Robot Operating System (ROS)

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 707))

Abstract

In this use case chapter, we summarize our experience during the development of an autonomous UAV for the German DLR Spacebot Cup robot competition. The autarkic UAV is designed as a companion robot for a ground robot supporting it with fast environment exploration and object localisation. On the basis of ROS Indigo we employed, extended and developed several ROS packages to build the intelligence of the UAV to let it fly autonomously and act meaningfully as an explorer to disclose the environment map and locate the target objects. Besides presenting our experiences and explaining our design decisions the chapter includes detailed descriptions of our hardware and software system as well as further  references that provide a foundation for developing own autonomous UAV resolving complex tasks using ROS. A special focus is given on the navigation with SLAM and visual odometry, object localisation, collision avoidance, exploration and high level planning and decision making. Extended and developed packages are available for download, see footnotes in the respective sections of the chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Complete task description in German at http://www.dlr.de/rd/Portaldata/28/Resources/dokumente/rr/AufgabenbeschreibungSpaceBotCup2015.pdf.

  2. 2.

    manufactured by Ascending Technologies.

  3. 3.

    http://wiki.mikrokopter.de/en/HexaKopter.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/KumarRobotics/bluefox2.git and

    https://github.com/KumarRobotics/camera_base.git.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/cehberlin/MikroKopterFlightController.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/cehberlin/Flow.

  7. 7.

    https://github.com/cehberlin/px-ros-pkg.

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/DAInamite/srf_serial and https://github.com/DAInamite/mikrokopter_node.

  9. 9.

    http://wiki.ros.org/viso2.

  10. 10.

    http://wiki.ros.org/fovis_ros.

  11. 11.

    https://github.com/cehberlin/ORB_SLAM.

  12. 12.

    https://github.com/raulmur/ORB_SLAM.

  13. 13.

    https://github.com/raulmur/ORB_SLAM2.

  14. 14.

    https://github.com/DAInamite/uav_position_controller.

  15. 15.

    https://github.com/cehberlin/control_toolbox.

  16. 16.

    http://wg-perception.github.io/tabletop/index.html#tabletop.

  17. 17.

    http://wg-perception.github.io/linemod/index.html#line-mod.

  18. 18.

    http://wg-perception.github.io/tod/index.html#tod.

  19. 19.

    https://github.com/DAInamite/uav_object_localisation.

  20. 20.

    http://wiki.ros.org/rosbag.

  21. 21.

    https://github.com/nyanp/tiny-cnn.

  22. 22.

    http://wiki.ros.org/navigation.

  23. 23.

    https://github.com/DAInamite/uav_exploration.git.

  24. 24.

    https://github.com/DAInamite/rhbp.

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Acknowledgements

The presented work was partially funded by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) with funds from the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) on the basis of a decision of the German Bundestag (Grant No: 50RA1420).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DAI-Labor, Technische Universität Berlin, Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587, Berlin, Germany

    Christopher-Eyk Hrabia, Martin Berger, Axel Hessler, Jan Brehmer & Sahin Albayrak

  2. Technische Universität Berlin, Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587, Berlin, Germany

    Stephan Wypler & Simon Matern

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  1. Christopher-Eyk Hrabia
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  2. Martin Berger
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Correspondence to Christopher-Eyk Hrabia .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of CS & Informat Systems, Prince Sultan University College of CS & Informat Systems, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Anis Koubaa

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Hrabia, CE. et al. (2017). An Autonomous Companion UAV for the SpaceBot Cup Competition 2015. In: Koubaa, A. (eds) Robot Operating System (ROS). Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 707. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54927-9_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54927-9_11

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