Development of a Control and Vision Interface for an AR.Drone

The AR.Drone is a remote controlled quadcopter which is low cost, and readily available for consumers. Therefore it represents a simple test-bed on which control and vision research may be conducted. However, interfacing with the AR.Drone can be a challenge for new researchers as the AR.Drone's application programming interface (API) is built on low-level, bit-wise, C instructions. Therefore, this paper will demonstrate the use of an additional layer of abstraction on the AR.Drone's API via the Robot Operating System (ROS). Using ROS, the construction of a high-level graphical user interface (GUI) will be demonstrated, with the explicit aim of assisting new researchers in developing simple control and vision algorithms to interface with the AR.Drone. The GUI, formally known as the Control and Vision Interface (CVI) is currently used to research and develop computer vision, simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM), and path planning algorithms by a number of postgraduate and undergraduate students at the school of Aeronautical, Mechanical, and Mechatronics Engineering (AMME) in The University of Sydney.