An Open-Source Testbed for Outdoor Navigation With the AR.Drone Quadrotor

The development and the experimental validation of a workbench capable of supporting outdoor flights using basically the affordable commercial quadrotor AR.Drone 2.0 and a personal computer is considered in this article. The text discusses some technical details of the developed system, focusing on how to achieve real-time navigation adopting a simplified dynamic model as a high-level representation of the vehicle in flight, a general-purpose nonlinear controller, suitable for different types of control applications, and a sensor fusion algorithm, designed to compensate for delayed measurements in the available sensory data. To check the effectiveness of such testbed, results associated to some experimental flights are presented, with the vehicle accomplishing positioning tasks, considering a fixed target point and a sequence of waypoints, and trajectory tracking tasks. Such results, associated to the theoretical analysis provided, allow claiming that the proposed system is an efficient way to guide the vehicle to accomplish different tasks. Additionally, the source code used is available for free download and modification, resulting in a valuable open-source workbench for researchers just starting working with aerial robotics.