Bitcraze Crazyflie

Introduction 

Crazyflie 2.1 by Bitcraze can be found here

Installation 

Prerequisites 

First thing to do is to configure your Crazyflie(s). In order to do that, please follow these steps:

Install the cfclient.
Setup UDEV permissions for using the Crazyradio.
Perform a firmware upgrade.
Configure the radio address for your crazyflie. To do this, connect your crazyflie, then open “Connect->Configure 2.X” to open the address configuration dialog. Please use a different address for each crazyflie to be used in a swarm.

These steps are meant to be done once.

Install platform package 

For binary installation, install by running:

sudo apt install ros-humble-as2-platform-crazyflie

Warning

This package is not available for binary installation yet. Cooming soon.

For source installation, clone Aerostack2 repository into your workspace and build it. See it in Aerostack2 installation guide.

Aerostack2 Common Interface 

For more details about platform control modes and sensors, see Aerostack2 Aerial Platform Concepts.

Control Modes 

These are supported control modes:

Control Modes Gazebo Platform
Control Mode	Yaw Mode	Reference Frame
Hover	None	None
Speed	Speed	ENU
Speed in a plane	Speed	ENU

Sensors 

These are supported sensors:

Sensors Gazebo Platform
Sensor	Topic	Type
Odometry	sensor_measurements/odom	nav_msgs/Odometry
IMU	sensor_measurements/imu	sensor_msgs/Imu
Battery	sensor_measurements/battery	sensor_msgs/BatteryState

Platform Launch 

In order to map the adresses of the crazyflie(s) we just configured to the input adresses of the platfom, we need to use a .yaml configuration file with the format as the following example:

cf0:
    uri: radio://0/80/2M/E7E7E7E700
cf1:
    uri: radio://0/80/2M/E7E7E7E701

In this case, we are mapping two Crazyflies with uri’s radio://0/80/2M/E7E7E7E700 and radio://0/80/2M/E7E7E7E701 for namespaces cf0 and cf1 respectively. As you can see for the radio id part of the uri, the same Crazyradio is going to be used for both.

This configuration file’s path shall serve as an input to the platform launch parameter swarm_config_file. Note that this platform is launched only once, regardless of the number of crazyflies beeing used.

Aerostack2 Crazyflie platform provides a launch file, which parameters are:

Gazebo Platform Parameters
Parameter	Type	Description
swarm_config_file	string	Path to the swarm URI’s configuration file.
control_modes_file	string	Optional. File path with the control modes configuration. Default the one in the package.
external_odom	bool	Optional. Use external odometry source. Default false.
external_odom_topic	bool	Optional. Topic name of external odometry source. Default ‘external_odom’.
controller_type	int	Optional. Controller type: Any(0), PID(1), Mellinger(2), INDI(3). Default PID.
estimator_type	int	Optional. Estimator type: Any(0), complementary(1), kalman(2). Default Kalman.

Example of launch command with a Crazyflies with flow deck:

ros2 launch as2_platform_crazyflie crazyflie_swarm_launch.py swarm_config_file:=uris_yaml_path

Example of launch command with a Crazyflies with motion capture system:

ros2 launch as2_platform_crazyflie crazyflie_swarm_launch.py swarm_config_file:=uris_yaml_path external_odom:=true external_odom_topic:=mocap_topic_name

Examples 

Basic example 

Simple Crazyflie Example