🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the challenges commonly encountered in multirotor flight control research—namely, the complexity of simulation-to-hardware workflows, poor code readability, and limited extensibility—by presenting a lightweight, modular, full-stack open-source flight control system built on ROS 2 and ROSflight 2.0. The proposed architecture enables seamless deployment between simulation and real hardware while significantly simplifying code structure without compromising performance. Its high modularity enhances both readability and extensibility, facilitating rapid research iteration. Experimental results demonstrate that the system achieves waypoint tracking performance comparable to state-of-the-art flight controllers, yet with a smaller, cleaner codebase that streamlines development and validation in academic settings.
📝 Abstract
ROScopter is a lean multirotor autopilot built for researchers. ROScopter seeks to accelerate simulation and hardware testing of research code with an architecture that is both easy to understand and simple to modify. ROScopter is designed to interface with ROSflight 2.0 and runs entirely on an onboard flight computer, leveraging the features of ROS 2 to improve modularity. This work describes the architecture of ROScopter and how it can be used to test application code in both simulated and hardware environments. Hardware results of the default ROScopter behavior are presented, showing that ROScopter achieves similar performance to another state-of-the-art autopilot for basic waypoint-following maneuvers, but with a significantly reduced and more modular code-base.