Abstract

In this use case chapter, we summarize our experience during the development of an autonomous UAV for the German DLR Spacebot Cup robot competition. The autarkic UAV is designed as a companion robot for a ground robot supporting it with fast environment exploration and object localisation. On the basis of ROS Indigo we employed, extended and developed several ROS packages to build the intelligence of the UAV to let it fly autonomously and act meaningfully as an explorer to disclose the environment map and locate the target objects. Besides presenting our experiences and explaining our design decisions the chapter includes detailed descriptions of our hardware and software system as well as further references that provide a foundation for developing own autonomous UAV resolving complex tasks using ROS. A special focus is given on the navigation with SLAM and visual odometry, object localisation, collision avoidance, exploration and high level planning and decision making. Extended and developed packages are available for download, see footnotes in the respective sections of the chapter.

@InBook{Hrabia_Robot_2017,
  Title                    = {Robot Operating System (ROS) - The Complete Reference (Volume 2)},
  Author                   = {Christopher-Eyk Hrabia and Martin Berger and Axel Hessler and Stephan Wypler and Jan Brehmer and Simon Matern and Sahin Albayrak},
  Chapter                  = {An autonomous companion UAV for the SpaceBot Cup competition 2015},
  Editor                   = {Anis Koubaa},
  Publisher                = {Springer International Publishing},
  Year                     = {2017},
  Doi                      = {10.1007/978-3-319-54927-9},
  pages = {345-385},
}