ROScopter: A Multirotor Autopilot based on ROSflight 2.0

TL;DR

ROScopter is a modular, ROS 2-based multirotor autopilot designed for researchers to facilitate easy testing and modification of flight code in simulation and hardware, with comparable performance to existing autopilots.

Contribution

It introduces a lightweight, modular autopilot architecture based on ROSflight 2.0, enhancing ease of use and adaptability for research purposes.

Findings

Achieves similar waypoint-following performance to state-of-the-art autopilots.

Features a significantly reduced and more modular code-base.

Operates entirely on onboard flight computers using ROS 2.

Abstract

ROScopter is a lean multirotor autopilot built for researchers. ROScopter seeks to accelerate simulation and hardware testing of research code with an architecture that is both easy to understand and simple to modify. ROScopter is designed to interface with ROSflight 2.0 and runs entirely on an onboard flight computer, leveraging the features of ROS 2 to improve modularity. This work describes the architecture of ROScopter and how it can be used to test application code in both simulated and hardware environments. Hardware results of the default ROScopter behavior are presented, showing that ROScopter achieves similar performance to another state-of-the-art autopilot for basic waypoint-following maneuvers, but with a significantly reduced and more modular code-base.