7. Take Off & Fly

Overview

This section describes how to launch, take off, and fly autonomously using ROScopter. This section assumes you have completed either MoCap Setup, or GPS Setup.

Launch the System

Pre-flight Checklist

Before launching, run through the ROSflight pre-flight checklist.

Heading Configuration For accurate heading initialization, place the multirotor facing the North direction. By default the quad initializes with a North estimate for heading. If the initial orientation is off, the heading estimate should converge to the correct value during flight. However, the heading estimate will not correct itself in hover flight, horizontal movement is required for the GPS to estimate heading.

Launch

ssh into the companion computer on your flight system and run either of the two launch files.

Indoor Flight
$ roslaunch roscopter mocap.launch

Outdoor Flight
$ roslaunch roscopter gps.launch

Calibrate the IMU, and if flying outdoors calibrate the barometer at ground level.

$ rosservice call /rosflight/calibrate_imu

$ rosservice call /rosflight/calibrate_baro

Take Off

Arm your flight controller and turn off the the RC override switch controlling theRC_ATT_OVRD_CHN and RC_THR_OVRD_CHN parameters.

Start flying your vehicle in RC control. When ready, let go of any stick deviations controlling attitude, and turn the throttle all the way up. Your vehicle should now be in full autopilot!

Be wary and lower the throttle if your flight system approaches any dangerous situations.

To improve performance, adjust gains in your YAML file as needed.

This section lists commands to check flight status of the multirotor

Flight Status

Controller

To check the control status of your vechicle, run rostopic echo on the following topics

/roscopter/high_level_command

EKF Estimator

To check the raw EKF estimation run rostopic echo on the following topic

/roscopter/odom

To check the EKF estimate in the same format as high_level_command view the following topic

/roscopter/pose_euler

MoCap Estimates

To check the motion capture system output while flying your vehicle in the Motion Capture room run

$ rosrun optitrack_vrpn node

GPS Estimator

To check GPS output in outdoor flight for the U-blox f9p module run rostopic echo on the following topics

/GlonassEphemeris
/PosVelEcef
/PosVelTime