Control of multiple quadcopters in cooperative flight in outdoor environment

Abstract

This report demonstrates the exploration of the developer options in controlling a popular commercial drone, Parrot AR.Drone 2.0. The AR.Drone 2.0 by default can only be connected to a single Wi-Fi-enabled device such as a smartphone or tablet via an app. ROS running on Linux Ubuntu is shown to be able to manipulate the movement of the drone via a joystick controller. The services of the drone, such as photography or navigation data is shown to be retrievable, which can then be directed to different software to be processed and then used for the developer’s program. For two drones, a custom wireless network was successfully established with drones connected and the movement manipulated via a joystick controller too. The powerful ability to pick and build ROS nodes to create a user-defined robot operating system is demonstrated in the report.