I am very passionate about my work. I love creating new things and bringing them to life. I always try to spread my illusion to the other members of my team.
The aim of this Master Thesis will be to develop a fully ROS enabled quadrotor and demonstrate the capabilities of the platform on a realistic flight scenario. ROS (Robotic Operating System) is an open source distributed robotics platform designed to accelerate robotic research and development by supporting reusable and modular components able to implement a variety of low and high level functionalities, while during the last 3 years it has received significant attention from the scientific community, as the most prestigious research groups in the area of robotics are putting efforts in this field.
The open source approach and the vast amount of ROS libraries are setting a novel approach in designing robotic applications, especially for the cases that fast development and proof of concept is needed at the early stages. For every new robotic application the robotic engineer should be able to understand the fundamental properties of ROS, synthesize the existing modular functionalities and develop the additional ones where it is needed, a task that demands a very good knowledge of the system under development as also very good programming skills. Although there are currently a few examples of ROS enabled UAVs still there a lot of efforts needed to optimize the flight performance with respect to the selected flight platform, the onboard sensors, the application scenario and the environmental condition, while the most complete ROS enable quadrotor platform has been demonstrated indoors with localization cameras in the Penn University.
