A Full Distributed Multipurpose Autonomous Flight System Using 3D Position Tracking and ROS

This document describes an approach to develop a fully distributed multipurpose autonomous flight system. With a set of hardware, software, and standard flight procedures for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), it is possible to achieve a relative low-cost plug and play fully-distributed architecture for multipurpose applications. The resulting system comprises an OptiTrack motion capture system, a Pixhawk flight controller, a Raspberry Pi companion computer, and the Robotic Operating System (ROS) for internode communication. The architecture leverages a secondary PID controller with the use of MAVROS, an open-source Python plugin for ROS, for onboard processing and interfacing with the flight controller. Featuring a procedure that receives the position vector from Optitrack System and returns the desired velocity vector for each time-step. This facilitates ease of integration for researchers. The result is a reliable, easy to use an autonomous system for multipurpose engineering research. To demonstrate its extensiveness, this paper shows experiments of a robotics navigation experiment utilizing the fundamentals of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) running at 60Hz, Wireless and with a network latency below 2ms. This paper reasons why fully distributed systems should be embraced as it maintains the reliability of the system with lower cost and easier implementation for the ground station. Combined with an intelligent choice approach for developing software architecture, it encourages and facilitates the use of autonomous systems for transdisciplinary research.