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

Python

Add transformations.py v2018.9.5 to your Python environment.

Install Gazebo v9

sudo apt install gazebo11 libgazebo11 libgazebo11-dev

Run gazebo on the command line, fix any problems before continuing.

Additional ROS packages

sudo apt install ros-foxy-gazebo-ros-pkgs ros-foxy-cv-bridge

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

Integrate with fiducial_vlam

cd ~/tello_ros_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/ptrmu/fiducial_vlam.git
cd ..      
colcon build --event-handlers console_direct+
source install/local_setup.bash
ros2 launch tello_gazebo vlam_launch.py

You’ll see 2 drones appear facing a field of ArUco markers. Both drones will be localized against the markers – run rviz2 to see the results. You can only control drone1.