Commenced in January 2007
Frequency: Monthly
Edition: International
Paper Count: 32759
Development of Tools for Multi Vehicles Simulation with Robot Operating System and ArduPilot

Authors: Pierre Kancir, Jean-Philippe Diguet, Marc Sevaux

Abstract:

One of the main difficulties in developing multi-robot systems (MRS) is related to the simulation and testing tools available. Indeed, if the differences between simulations and real robots are too significant, the transition from the simulation to the robot won’t be possible without another long development phase and won’t permit to validate the simulation. Moreover, the testing of different algorithmic solutions or modifications of robots requires a strong knowledge of current tools and a significant development time. Therefore, the availability of tools for MRS, mainly with flying drones, is crucial to enable the industrial emergence of these systems. This research aims to present the most commonly used tools for MRS simulations and their main shortcomings and presents complementary tools to improve the productivity of designers in the development of multi-vehicle solutions focused on a fast learning curve and rapid transition from simulations to real usage. The proposed contributions are based on existing open source tools as Gazebo simulator combined with ROS (Robot Operating System) and the open-source multi-platform autopilot ArduPilot to bring them to a broad audience.

Keywords: ROS, ArduPilot, MRS, simulation, drones, Gazebo.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2643956

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 842

References:


[1] Z. Yan, L. Fabresse, J. Laval, and N. Bouraqadi, “Metrics for performance benchmarking of multi-robot exploration,” IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, vol. 2015-Decem, pp. 3407–3414, 2015.
[2] G. Francesca and M. Birattari, “Automatic design of robot swarms: achievements and challenges,” Frontiers in Robotics and AI, vol. 3, p. 29, 2016.
[3] D. Portugal and R. P. Rocha, “Distributed multi-robot patrol: A scalable and fault-tolerant framework,” Robotics and Autonomous Systems, vol. 61, no. 12, pp. 1572–1587, 2013.
[4] E. ¸Sahin and A. Winfield, “Special issue on swarm robotics,” Swarm Intelligence, vol. 2, no. 2-4, pp. 69–72, 2008.
[5] B. P. Gerkey, R. Vaughan, and A. Howard, “The player/stage project: Tools for multi-robot and distributed sensor systems,” 08 2003.
[6] M. Quigley, K. Conley, B. Gerkey, J. FAust, T. Foote, J. Leibs, E. Berger, R. Wheeler, and A. Mg, “ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System,” Icra, vol. 3, no. Figure 1, p. 5, 2009.
[7] N. Koenig and a. Howard, “Design and use paradigms for Gazebo, an open-source multi-robot simulator,” 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37566), vol. 3, pp. 2149–2154, 2004.
[8] C. Robotics, “V-rep,” 2018. (Online). Available: "http://www. coppeliarobotics.com/".
[9] G. Echeverria, N. Lassabe, A. Degroote, and S. Lemaignan, “Modular openrobots simulation engine: Morse,” in Proceedings of the IEEE ICRA, 2011.
[10] L. E. L. Parker, “Current research in multirobot systems,” Artificial Life and Robotics, pp. 1–5, 2003. (Online). Available: http: //link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02480877.
[11] R. Arumugam, V. R. Enti, L. Bingbing, W. Xiaojun, K. Baskaran, F. F. Kong, A. S. Kumar, K. D. Meng, and G. W. Kit, “DAvinCi: A cloud computing framework for service robots,” 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2010, pp. 3084–3089, may 2010. (Online). Available: http://www.scopus.com/ inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-77955831617{&}partnerID=40{&}md5= 475cec250602b92879b9751beb70f40b.
[12] D. Hunziker, M. Gajamohan, M. Waibel, and R. D’Andrea, “Rapyuta: The RoboEarth cloud engine,” Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 438–444, 2013.
[13] R. Doriya, P. Chakraborty, and G. C. Nandi, “’Robot-Cloud’: A framework to assist heterogeneous low cost robots,” Proceedings - 2012 International Conference on Communication, Information and Computing Technology, ICCICT 2012, pp. 1–5, oct 2012. (Online). Available: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/lpdocs/epic03/wrapper. htm?arnumber=6398208.
[14] Ardupilot, “Ardupilot,” 2018. (Online). Available: http://ardupilot.org/ ardupilot/index.html.
[15] L. Meier, D. Honegger, and M. Pollefeys, “PX4: A node-based multithreaded open source robotics framework for deeply embedded platforms,” 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 6235–6240, 2015. (Online). Available: http://www.inf. ethz.ch/personal/lomeier/publications/px4{_}autopilot{_}icra2015.pdf.
[16] DJI, “DJI,” 2017. (Online). Available: http://www.dji.com/fr.
[17] PaparazziUAV, “PaparazziUAV,” 2018. (Online). Available: https: //github.com/paparazzi/paparazzi.
[18] Mavros, “Mavros,” 2018. (Online). Available: https://github.com/ mavlink/mavros.
[19] MAVLink, “MAVLink,” 2017. (Online). Available: https://mavlink.io/ en/.
[20] P. Kancir, “gazebo_ardu,” 2017. (Online). Available: https://github.com/ khancyr/gazebo_ardu.
[21] OSRF, “Comparison of single-board computers,” 2018. (Online). Available: "https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo_models/src/ 9533d55593096e7ebdfb539e99d2bf9cb1bff347/pioneer2dx/model.sdf? at=default&fileviewer=file-view-default".
[22] P. Kancir, “ardupilot_gazebo,” 2017. (Online). Available: https: //github.com/khancyr/ardupilot_gazebo.
[23] T. H. Chung, M. R. Clement, M. A. Day, K. D. Jones, D. Davis, and M. Jones, “Live-fly, large-scale field experimentation for large numbers of fixed-wing uavs,” in 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2016, pp. 1255–1262.
[24] ArduPilot, “Ardupilot precision landing,” 2018. (Online). Available: "http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/precision-landing-with-irlock.html".
[25] A. Sinisterra, M. Dhanak, and N. Kouvaras, “A usv platform for surface autonomy,” in OCEANS 2017 - Anchorage, Sept 2017, pp. 1–8.