UAV-RT Connection package

This ROS 2 Node is responsible for establishing and monitoring a UDP or serial connection with a PX4 autopilot, as well as encoding and decoding MAVLink messages that are passed through the companion computer's PX4 autopilot (with a SiK 915 MHz telemetry radio) to the ground control station's (GCS) PX4 autopilot (also connected to a 915 MHz radio). The GCS is running a custom version of QGroundControl (QGC) developed by Don Gagne.

The development of this code was funded via National Science Foundation grant no. 2104570.

Features

Note: These features need to be updated. I will do this once I start the UAV-RT documenation, since text from that documentation will end up here.

• Establishes and monitors a serial or UDP connection with a PX4 autopilot or Gazebo SITL
  • This connection is established and utilized with MAVSDK C++
• Recieves and publishes telemetry data from the PX4 at a rate of 2Hz
  • This data is published to the /antennaPose topic
  • This data is written to a dynamic array
  • Able to write this telemetry data to a .txt file for post-processing
• Performs interpolation and slerp for determining the position of the UAV in space given a timestamp
  • Pulse data is generated/supplied by UAV-RT detectors
    • This data is collected through a subscriber that is subscribed to the /pulse topic
  • Position and quaterion is sourced from the telemetry data collected from the PX4
  • Publishes the pulse and interpolated/slerped data to the /pulsePose topic
• Encodes pulse and interpolated/slerped data so that it can be sent as a MAVLink message to QGC
• Decodes messages MAVLink message sent from QGC and forwards them to UAV-RT/Supervisor
• Supported messages are outlined in the "Tag Interface Control" document
• The messages are stored within MAVLink's DEBUG_FLOAT_ARRAY #350

Documentation

The supporting documentation for this project can be found here. (TBD)

System requirements

The system requirments for the use of this package can be found here. (TBD)

Installation

This installation assumes that you have completed the installation process for uavrt_source.

Linux

Within a terminal window, run the following commands:

source /opt/ros/galactic/setup.bash
cd ~/uavrt_workspace/uavrt_source/

You must be a member of the Dynamic and Active Systems Lab organization on Github. Authentication is currently required for the following command:

git clone https://github.com/dynamic-and-active-systems-lab/uavrt_connection/
cd ~/uavrt_workspace/

"All required rosdeps installed successfully" should be returned after the following command:

rosdep install -i --from-path uavrt_source --rosdistro galactic -y

The following command will only build out the uavrt_connection package. This is done to isolate errors or warnings:

colcon build --packages-select uavrt_connection
source /opt/ros/galactic/setup.bash
. install/local_setup.bash

If these commands didn't fail, then your installation of uavrt_connection should be complete.

Basic operation

In order to run the uavrt_connection package in isolation, use the following command:

ros2 run uavrt_connection main #

Where # corresponds to the type of connection you will be using.

Enter a '0' to use a serial connection or enter a '1' to use an UDP connection. For Serial, the connection string will be: 'serial:///dev/ttyACM0', and expects a PX4 autopilot to be plugged into this port. For UDP, the connection string will be: 'udp://:14540', and expects a Gazebo SITL to be running at this port.

Troubleshooting

If you or your team encounter issues while installing or using the uavrt_connection package, please open a new issue within the "Issues" tab of the repository.

License

This codebase is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0.