Pilot DroneUI: An User Interface to Control UAV using Robot Operating System

Abstract

This paper presents ongoing research work on developing a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to control drones using the Robot Operating System (ROS) and Qt framework from the ground station PC. Due to an increase in work complexity, robotic application development is becoming exhaustive and demanding to use multiple terminal tabs and need for the repeated multiple commands execution while conducting experiments. The combination of ROS and Qt frameworks allows an opportunity to develop a robust and simple-yet-effective GUI for controlling robots and autonomous vehicles. The novel pilot GUI transmits fundamental navigational commands to the drone for maneuvering in the 3-dimensional space. A user study was done to evaluate the pilot GUI's performance. The findings indicated that the developed pilot GUI is simple to use and operate the drone.