Working with a real MAV/drone – Parrot, Bebop

Although it is nice, of course, to have a simulation of an MAV such as RotorS, it always raises the question of how well it represents the real world scenario and how feasible the transition from simulation to real MAVs would be. However, during the design and development of RotorS simulator, a lot of effort has been invested into keeping the model of the simulator as close as possible to the real system.

Getting ready

In the best case, in an ideal world, just switching the simulation environment with an ROS node that communicates with the hardware will get real MAVs to perform high-level tasks such as autonomous navigation, including collision avoidance and path planning.

The simulator can be a great tool that enables the development of algorithms, to be deployed on a real MAV later. Then, the transition of the code from the simulator to the code running on the actual hardware will be as simple as possible, but only if the interface is designed...