ROS2 Bridge for Parrot ANAFI Drones

This ROS2 package contains the interface to the Olympe SDK. Currently, it is compatible with the following models from the Parrot ANAFI family: 4K, Thermal, USA and Ai.

Overview

Author: Andriy Sarabakha
Affiliation: Aarhus University, Denmark
Maintainer: Andriy Sarabakha, andriy@ece.au.dk

Keywords: Parrot Anafi, ROS, controller

This is research code, expect that it changes often, and any fitness for a particular purpose is disclaimed.

Publications

For more details, please refer to:

• A. Sarabakha and P. N. Suganthan, "anafi_ros: from Off-the-Shelf Drones to Research Platforms," 2023 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), Warsaw, Poland, 2023, pp. 1308-1315, doi: 10.1109/ICUAS57906.2023.10155881. (PDF)

If you use this work in an academic context, please cite the paper:

@INPROCEEDINGS{anafiROS,
  author={Sarabakha, Andriy and Suganthan, Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam},
  booktitle={2023 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems~(ICUAS)}, 
  title={{anafi_ros: from Off-the-Shelf Drones to Research Platforms}}, 
  year={2023},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={1308-1315},
  doi={10.1109/ICUAS57906.2023.10155881}}

Installation

This package has been tested with python3 in ROS2 Humble/Ubuntu 22.04 (recommended), ROS2 Kilted/Ubuntu 24.04 and ROS2 Foxy/Ubuntu 20.04.

Dependencies

• Parrot Olympe 7.5.0 - SDK for Parrot drones:

  pip install parrot-olympe==7.5.0
  

  Troubleshooting

  ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement parrot-olympe (from versions: none)

  Install the latest version of pip:

  sudo apt-get install python3-pip python-dev
  echo 'export PATH="~/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
  source ~/.bashrc
  

  Command 'python' not found

  Set python3 as the default python version:

  echo 'alias python=python3' >> ~/.bash_aliases
  source ~/.bash_aliases
  

  TypeError: Expected a message Descriptor, got Descriptor

  Install protobuf version 3.6:

  pip install protobuf==3.6
  

  AttributeError: module 'collections' has no attribute 'MutableMapping'

  Install protobuf version 3.20.0:

  pip install protobuf==3.20.0
  

• OpenCV - library for real-time computer vision:

  pip install opencv-python
  

• SciPy - library for scientific and technical computing:

  pip install scipy
  

• Requests - library for making HTTP requests:

  pip install requests
  

Note

To install Python packages using pip in Ubuntu 24.04, you can add --break-system-packages flag:

pip install --user <package_name> --break-system-packages

Build

To build from source, clone the latest version from this repository into your ROS2 workspace and build the package using:

cd ~/ros2_ws/src
git clone -b ros2 https://github.com/andriyukr/anafi_ros.git
sudo chmod -R 777 anafi_ros/
cd ..
colcon build
source install/setup.bash

Troubleshooting

SetuptoolsDeprecationWarning: setup.py install is deprecated. Use build and pip and other standards-based tools.

Install setuptools version 58.2.0:

pip install setuptools==58.2.0

Usage

Important

Remember to update the firmware of the drone and the SkyController.

Tip

• To update the firmware of ANAFI 4K and Thermal, use FreeFlight 6 app for Android or iOS.
• To update the firmware of ANAFI USA, use FreeFlight 6 USA app for Android or iOS.
• To update the firmware of ANAFI Ai, use FreeFlight 7 app for iOS.

To connect to the drone, run in the terminal:

ros2 launch anafi_ros_nodes anafi_launch.py namespace:='anafi' ip:='192.168.53.1' model:='ai'

where

• namespace is the namespace for this specific drone, it is used to connect to multiple drones;
• ip is the IP address of the device to connect, it has to be
  • '192.168.53.1', for connection through Skycontroller (recommended),
  • '192.168.42.1', for direct connection to the drone through WiFi,
  • '10.202.0.1', for connection to the simulated drone in Sphinx;
• model (ignored, when connecting through Skycontroller) is the model of the drone, it has to be '4k', 'thermal', 'usa' or 'ai', depending on the drone model you are connecting to.

Important

To send commands to the drone, you must switch to offboard mode. To switch to offboard mode, set drone/offboard parameter to True.

Note

The anafi_autonomy ROS2 package is based on this anafi_ros package and contains an interface to control Parrot Anafi drones.

Package details

The complete list of subscribed and published topics, available services and parameters is here.

Connect multiple drones

Follow the instructions here.

Simulation environment

Follow the instructions here.