px4_fast_planner

Integration of Fast-Planner with PX4 for planning real-time collision-free and obstacle-free trajectories in bounded environment. This allows you to fly a multi-rotor drone ( equipped with a PX4 autopilot, depth camera, and on-board computer) autonomously while avoiding obstacles.

This packges provides installation and launch files required for running PX4 with Fast-Planner through mavros_controllers package. A modified vresion of Fast-Planner (for Ubuntu 18 + ROS Melodic) is used.

Video:

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If this helps you in your project(s), please give a star to this repository and Fast-Planner and mavros_controllers. Thank you!

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Installation

This setup is tested on Ubuntu 18 + ROS Melodic

• Clone this package into your ~/catkin_ws/src

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/mzahana/px4_fast_planner.git

• You can use the setup.sh script in the install folder to easily setup all dependencies as follows

cd ~/catkin_ws/src/px4_fast_planner/install
./setup.sh

The script will ask if PX4 is to be installled or not. You would likely want to skip this if you are doing the setup on an on-board computer. To do that, just pass n to the setup.sh script when asked

cd ~/catkin_ws/src/px4_fast_planner/install
./setup.sh

NOTE: you may need to provide credentials to sudo when prompted, for the script to continue

The setup.sh script install PX4 v1.10.1, mavros_controllers package, and modified Fast-Planner package.

Installation inside docker container

You can setup the system inside a docker container that already has Ubuntu 18 + ROS Melodic + PX4 frimware v1.10.1. Use this repository to setup docker and required container, then install setup px4_fast_planner as mentioned above.

Running in Simulation

• Open a termianl, and run the following command,

roslaunch px4_fast_planner px4_fast_planner.launch

NOTE: It may take some time to download some Gazebo world models in the first time you run the simulation

• To command the drone to fly to a target pose, publish a single message to the /move_base_simple/goal topic as follows

rostopic pub --once /move_base_simple/goal geometry_msgs/PoseStamped "header:
  seq: 0
  stamp:
    secs: 0
    nsecs: 0
  frame_id: ''
pose:
  position:
    x: 19.0
    y: 15.0
    z: 3.0
  orientation:
    x: 0.0
    y: 0.0
    z: 0.0
    w: 1.0"

Notes

TO ADD

• Some notes related to tuning parameters of the availabe planners
• Some notes related to the limitations of the available planners
• Instructions to run the setup on real drone