Connect drone to LSTS toolchain

[Paul]

Hi,
to my knowledge there are 3 ways to connect Neptus with a drone:

1. Neptus <-(IMC)-> Drone (with DUNE)
2. Neptus <-(IMC)-> DUNE <-(MAVLink)-> Drone (with ArduPilot or similar)
3. Neptus <-(STANAG)-> Drone (not mentioned often, so I'll omit that)

Say I have a drone with an autopilot that does not utilize either IMC or MAVLink.
Should I rather use DUNE as a bridge to the LSTS toolchain,or replace the autopilot?

I have looked into dune/vendor/libraries/mavlink on git to see how this got implemented.
However, as implementing a new protocol is a big endeavor I'd like to hear some
experienced advice first, if possible.

with friendly regards,
Paul

[Maria Costa]

Hi Paul,

I guess it depends if your autopilot has already a communication protocol implemented or not.

If that's the case, I would recommend adding the library to the vendors folder (as mavlink) and then create a task to handle the interaction between the autopilot and DUNE/IMC (similar to what the Ardupilot task does for mavlink). It would be the fastest integration without having to replace the autopilot.

If your autopilot doesn't have any protocol and if you know how to interact with it, I would go for the DUNE approach (you would have a custom solution for your needs). But I guess it depends on the time and resources you have available. If you need a quick solution and replacing the autopilot is not an issue, using a pixhawk (or an apm) with ArduPlane/ArduCopter is the easiest path (it's already done).

Best regards,

Maria Costa

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[Paul]

Hello Maria,
thanks for the reply.

After carefully weighting our options it's best not to mess with the drone software ourself (warranty reason, but also because it is quite sophisticated and replacing it would be a shame).
So the question only slightly changed from my original post:
Is it viable to connect a drone to Neptus without DUNE?
Would the sparsely mentioned STANAG 4586 protocol be a better interface to communicate with a drone, or is there an even better alternative solution?

After some talks with the drone manufacturer, they mentioned being willing to implement IMC themselves, if it is well documented.
I'm currently trying to figure out which IMC messages are vital to roughly estimate a scope for this.

They also mentioned ROS when it came to communicating with the drone ( http://ros.org/ ). Are there any propositions from LSTS to implement a ROS interface?

with friendly regards,
Paul

[João Fortuna]

Hi Paul,

There was some work on that (ROS and IMC). Check these links:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/lsts-toolchain/X0kF4QcuqnE

https://github.com/labust/labust-ros-pkg/wiki/ROS-IMC-module

Regards,

João

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[Ricardo Martins]

Hi Paul,

This project makes the full set of IMC messages available to ROS:

https://github.com/oceanscan/ros-imc-broker

Kind regards,

Ricardo Martins

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