Overview

An aerial platform connects Aerostack2 to one kind of drone or simulator. Everything above it stays the same, so a mission tested in simulation flies a real drone once you change the platform. How platforms work, their state machine and their control modes are explained on the aerial platform concept page.

Available platforms

The two simulators ship with Aerostack2. The others live in their own repositories under the aerostack2 organization and are built from source in your workspace, next to Aerostack2.

Crazyflie and both DJI platforms aren't supported on Jazzy yet. The Betaflight platform is deprecated and no longer maintained.

Which simulator

Start with the multirotor simulator. It needs no 3D engine, starts in a second and runs anywhere, including macOS. Move to Gazebo when a mission needs sensors that see the world, like cameras and lidars, or a 3D world to fly in.

Running a platform

Each drone runs its own platform node, named platform, in the drone's namespace. Every platform has a launch file that takes the namespace and its configuration files, for example:

ros2 launch as2_platform_multirotor_simulator as2_platform_multirotor_simulator.launch.py \
  namespace:=drone0

The rest of the stack runs next to it, and two choices depend on the platform:

• The state estimator plugin. Simulators provide ground truth, while real drones usually provide their own odometry.
• The motion controller plugin, which has to produce a control mode the platform accepts.

Your own drone

If your drone isn't listed, a platform for it is a single node with a handful of methods. See writing a platform and the platform guide.