ROS package to sequencer mission waypoints and communicate them to the controller.

Maintainer: Martin Scheiber

This code was written by the Control of Networked System (CNS) Group, University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria.

This software is made available to the public to use (source-available), licensed under the terms of the BSD-2-Clause-License with no commercial use allowed, the full terms of which are made available in the LICENSE file. No license in patents is granted.

If you use this software in an academic research setting, please cite the corresponding academic paper and consult the LICENSE file for a detailed explanation.

@article{cns_flightstack22,
    title        = {CNS Flight Stack for Reproducible, Customizable, and Fully Autonomous Applications},
    author       = {Scheiber, Martin and Fornasier, Alessandro and Jung, Roland and Böhm, Christoph and Dhakate, Rohit and Stewart, Christian and Steinbrener, Jan and Weiss, Stephan and Brommer, Christian},
    journal      = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
    volume       = {7},
    number       = {4},
    year         = {2022},
    doi          = {10.1109/LRA.2022.3196117},
    url          = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9849131},
    pages        = {11283--11290}
}

This package is part of the CNS Flight Stack and thus depends on the other packages of the flight stack:

• CNS Flight Stack: Autonomy Engine
• MavROS (CNS Version)
• PX4Bridge (CNS Version)

Further, the following libraries are required

• Eigen3
• ROS noetic

As this is a ROS package, please build it within the catkin environment with

catkin build mission_sequencer

The intended usage is together with the CNS Flight Stack: Autonomy Engine, which will interact with the mission sequencer. Use the provided launchfile to start the Mission Sequencer

roslaunch mission_sequencer mission_sequencer.launch

The following parameters can be set to modify the sequencer's behavior:

If required the sequencer can be used without the CNS Flight Stack: Autonomy Engine. The easiest way to do this is to enable the automatic sequencing, i.e. setting do_automatic_sequence to true. Then, when ready start the mission by publishing the ARM request:

rostopic pub /autonomy/request mission_sequencer/MissionRequest \
"{header: {seq: 0, stamp: {secs: 0, nsecs: 0}, frame_id: ''}, id: 0, request: 1}" -1

If the automatic sequencing shall remain disabled, one can still execute the requests manually. To do so use the above publication as a template. Further, the request type definition can be found in msg/MissionRequest.msg:

# request type definition
uint8 UNDEF   = 0 # Not used for request, used only for MS -> A communication without a specific request
uint8 ARM     = 1 # Arming (no takeoff)
uint8 TAKEOFF = 2 # Takeoff
uint8 HOLD    = 3 # mission hold request -- blocking, hold no until a resume request
uint8 RESUME  = 4 # resume mission request
uint8 LAND    = 5 # land request
uint8 HOVER   = 6 # hover request -- non blocking, when a new waypoint is received fly to it
uint8 ABORT   = 7 # mission aborted request - safety pilot will take manual control
uint8 DISARM  = 8 # Disarming

By default, the Mission Sequencer gets the waypoints from the Autonomy [CNS FlightStack: Autonomy Engine]. However, any node can publish waypoints on the /mission_sequencer/waypoint_list topic (message definition msg/MissionWaypointArray.msg). Here the following options exist:

Further, the mission sequencer publishes a waypoint message on /mission_sequencer/waypoint_reached whenever a waypoint has been reached.

If required for your node (obstacle detection), you can get the current list of waypoints with the service:

rosservice call /mission_sequencer/getStartPose "{}"

Please refer to the academic paper for further insights of the Mission Sequencer.

None at this point in time, please submit an issue request using the git interface if any issues arise.

/path/to/mission_sequencer$ tree -L 3 --noreport --charset unicode
.
|-- cmake
|   |-- Custom.cmake
|   |-- GetGitRevisionDescription.cmake
|   `-- GetGitRevisionDescription.cmake.in
|-- CMakeLists.txt
|-- CONTRIBUTORS.md
|-- docs
|   |-- CMakeLists.txt
|   |-- pkg-docs
|   |   |-- CMakeLists.txt
|   |   `-- doxyfile.in
|   `-- resources
|       |-- cns_UNI_and_CNS_LOGO_uniblue.png
|       |-- cns_UNI_and_CNS_LOGO_uniblue.svg
|       `-- state_diagram_sequencer.png
|-- include
|   `-- mission_sequencer
|       |-- mission_sequencer.hpp
|       |-- types
|       `-- utils
|-- launch
|   `-- mission_sequencer.launch
|-- LICENSE
|-- msg
|   |-- MissionRequest.msg
|   |-- MissionResponse.msg
|   |-- MissionWaypointArray.msg
|   |-- MissionWaypoint.msg
|   `-- MissionWaypointStamped.msg
|-- package.xml
|-- README.md
|-- src
|   |-- mission_sequencer.cpp
|   |-- mission_sequencer_node.cpp
|   `-- parser_waypoints.cpp
|-- srv
|   `-- GetStartPose.srv
|-- trajectories
    `-- test_trajectory.csv

Copyright (C) 2021-2023 Christian Brommer, Christoph Böhm, Alessandro Fornasier, Roland Jung, and Martin Scheiber, Control of Networked Systems Group, University of Klagenfurt, Austria. You can contact the authors at [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].