Aruco Marker Tracking with ARDrone2.0

Parrot ARDrone 2.0 is a well know drone to all and its mostly used for research. Here I did few formations using Aruco markers .

This Project includes

• Aruco Marker Following Ardrone
•  Gradient Descent Based PID Controller

First lets make the drone follows you, for this you need

1.  Aruco marker (here) (documentation)
2. Parrot Ardrone
3. ROS Indigo or above (here)
4. Download ardrone_autonomy package (here)

Aruco library is an extra module in Open CV 3.0, if you are using other versions of openCV, try installing open CV 3.0 extra modules with your current openCV version. (May be you need to dig up into this)

Note : I recommend Ubuntu 16.04 with ROS Kinetic can make life easier for this project
Install ardrone_autonomy package from here.
Then download our repository (here) to your ros workspace.
Creating of ros workspace (here) is already done in the page of downloading ardrone_autonomy package.
Before starting add the following to .bashrc file in your home folder and save that.
source catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash
Before running the main.py,change the marker size and marker id in main.py as per your marker.
Then start the ardrone_driver node from ardrone_autonomy package and start the marker tracking node (main.py) from formation_control package.
#connect the ardrone with your wifi
$roslaunch ardrone_autonomy ardrone.launch
$rosrun formation_control main.py
Then it will ask for take off in terminal (press t to take off) then after drone takeoff you can see the camera feed will be opened in a window.
That was working like charm for me, you can find following videos regarding that, (if needed change the PID parameters)

After this few formations has been done using multiple parrot ardrones like

•  Leader Follower Formation
• Traingle Formation

All these formations has been developed with both simulation and real time.

This work has been accepted as an article in ACM Digital Library. Link details will be shared soon.

Gradient descent based PID parameter tuning is explained here