RTAB-map Drone Example on github

[Stefacco]

Hi,

I am studying for a project on autonomous drone navigation in indoor environments.

I saw the "rtabmap_drone_example" example on gitlab.
Since I am new to this topic, I would like to ask for some information:

Is it possible to use this example on a real drone? Maybe by interfacing it with the sdk provided by the drone manufacturer?

If so, would you know how to suggest which drones are suitable or compatible for this type of project? For example, some DJI drones, the Parrot or others?

I thank you in advance.
Best regards

[matlabbe]

Hi,

The code could work on any drone using https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot

See a list of some existing drones using it: https://px4.io/devkits/

The example uses a desktop comptuer to compute visual odometry, on onboard drone you may have less computing available. The default parameters may produce too slow visual odometry (may try this to increase FPS).

Note that for the rtabmap/move_base parts, they could be integrated with any other autopilots (ideally if they support ros).

cheers,
Mathieu

[Stefacco]

Hi,

Thank you for your reply!

It’s also possible to unlock a 3D path planning?
There’s some algorithms that, by substituting move_base, can be integrated for this solution?

Thank you!

[matlabbe]

Well, you could probably use any 3D trajectory planner approaches (moveit/ompl). RTAB-Map can provide OctoMap topic to be used with a 3D planner.

In this paper, we successfully used a 3D planner on a autonomous exploring drone with OctoMap provided by RTAB-Map.

cheers,
Mathieu