Robot Operating System (ROS) Framework for Swarm Drone Flight Controller

Abstract

The ROS Framework for swarm drone flight controller has advantage on simplicity, flexibility, and integrability with the other ROS packages. This paper presents a ROS Framework design for a flight controller with a coordination and positioning capability. This design uses 6 nodes, 3 topics, and 3 messages. Development of the flight controller that has a coordination and positioning capability based on Robot Operating System (ROS). It is designed to control the movement of up to three drones. developed flight controller is designed to control the movement for as many drones as needed. The coordination capability is executed by a Raspberry Pi 3B on each drone and managed by ROS. It has been tested for horizontal and vertical movements. The first and third drone have an average speed difference with the second drone of ± 0,7 m/s and the distance travelled difference average is ± 1 meter when moving horizontally for 3 seconds. The speed difference and distance travelled when moving vertically for 3 seconds is ± 0,2 m/s and ± 0,5 meter.