Running a Tello simulation in Gazebo

tello_gazebo consists of several components:

  • TelloPlugin simulates a drone, handling takeoff, landing and very simple flight dynamics
  • markers contains Gazebo models for fiducial markers
  • fiducial.world is a simple world with a bunch of fiducial markers
  • inject_entity.py is a script that will read an URDF (ROS) or SDF (Gazebo) file and spawn a model in a running instance of Gazebo
  • the built-in camera plugin is used to emulate the Gazebo forward-facing camera

Installation

Install ROS2 Galactic

https://docs.ros.org/ with the `ros-galactic-desktop` option.

Make sure you have gazebo

sudo apt install gazebo11 libgazebo11 libgazebo11-dev

Add the following

sudo apt install libasio-dev
sudo apt install ros-galactic-cv-bridge ros-galactic-camera-calibration-parsers 
sudo apt install libignition-rendering3 
pip3 install transformations

Build this package

mkdir -p ~/tello_ros_ws/src
cd ~/tello_ros_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/TIERS/tello-ros2-gazebo.git
cd ..
source /opt/ros/galactic/setup.bash
colcon build

Run a teleop simulation

cd ~/tello_ros_ws
source install/setup.bash
export GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH=${PWD}/install/tello_gazebo/share/tello_gazebo/models
source /usr/share/gazebo/setup.sh
ros2 launch tello_gazebo simple_launch.py

You will see a single drone in a blank world. You can control the drone using the joystick.

If you run into the No namespace found error re-set GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH:

export GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH=${PWD}/install/tello_gazebo/share/tello_gazebo/models
source /usr/share/gazebo/setup.sh

Control the drone

ros2 service call /drone1/tello_action tello_msgs/TelloAction "{cmd: 'takeoff'}"
ros2 service call /drone1/tello_action tello_msgs/TelloAction "{cmd: 'land'}"
ros2 run teleop_twist_keyboard teleop_twist_keyboard --ros-args -r __ns:=/drone1