For our "off-center spinning mass controller" project, we wanted to control Crazyflie and run several different experiments on our drone. Ubuntu and ROS packages provided us with such platform. So we followed below paper as our guide. Flying Multiple UAVs Using ROS Since our Ubuntu and ROS version were different from the ones used in the paper, we wrote separate side note in order to properly install the packages mentioned in the paper. (tips for Installing ROS packages on Ubuntu.pdf ; We used ubuntu 16.04 with ROS Kinetic version) In our attached document we went over some tips and required packages in order to get our systemr running. package installation contained three sections:

  1. Crazyflie_ROS packages
  2. Python_lib packages
  3. VRPN Client package

Crazyflie_ROS packages were what we needed to control and analyze our drone.

Python libraries were pre-built packages by bit-craze including "python_library" for autonomous purposes and "python_client" for teleoperation with GUI.

Finally, VRPN is used to enable the communication between optitrack motion capture system(running on sepate windows mechine) and Ubuntu server (as the controller for Crazyflie). Here is demo on how Optitrack may communicate with Ubuntu server. Demo

Teleoperation can also be done (using ROS packages) as shown here.

For installing all mentioned packages you may also check our gitlab repository at: Crazyflie-ROS git repository

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