# ROS Aerial Community Work Group


## Meeting Notes - February 20nd, 2025

Forum Post: [https://discourse.ros.org/t/aerial-robotics-meeting-february-20th-2025/42012/](https://discourse.ros.org/t/aerial-robotics-meeting-february-20th-2025/42012/)

**Hosts**
* Kimberly McGuire
* Ramón Roche

**Attendees**
*26 attendees in total*

* Damien LaRocque
* Michael Carroll - Intrinsic.ai + ROS PMC
* Davide Iafrate - Duckietown Inc.
* Patrik Dominik Pordi - ARK Electronics
* Argenis Wong - Nexus AMR
* Rick Hernandez
* Don Gochenour - Real-Time Innovations
* Gael Gatera - Rogue Space Systems + Aerospace SIG
* Aniruddha Mallick - M.Sc. Aerospace student, TUM
* ...
* ...
* ...

## Agenda

* Announcements
* Roundtable
* Guest Presentation
* Announcement next meeting

### Announcements

* Gazebo classic is now EOL
* **FOSDEM 2025** Robotics and Development Room was a success!
* Pierre Kancir: [ArduPilot : Trusted, Versatile and FOSS autopilot for all and everything ](https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5476-ardupilot-trusted-versatile-and-foss-autopilot-for-all-and-everything/)
* Ramon Roche: [Build, Launch, and Soar with Dronecode: The infrastructure ecosystem for the development of autonomous aerial robotics.](https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6353-build-launch-and-soar-with-dronecode-the-infrastructure-ecosystem-for-the-development-of-autonomous-aerial-robotics-/)
* Most videos are available on the schedule: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/robotics/
* **Events**
* [Xponential Europe](https://www.xponential-europe.com/) is happening now, with the [European Drone Forum](https://eudroneforum.org/)
* [ICRA 2025](https://2025.ieee-icra.org/) has the workshops announced:
* [25 years of Aerial Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities]( https://aerial-robotics-workshop-icra.com/)
* Important events in Aerial robotics now listed in the [Aerial Robotics landscape](https://ros-aerial.github.io/aerial_robotic_landscape/events/)
* Any other announcements?
* Kilted Kajiu
* May 23rd release date (world turtle day)
* May 1th tutorial party (with RWM_Zenoh) You can win swag!

### Roundtable

* Who is working on what project?
* Has somebody seen an interesting project?
* Any request for help?

Projects:
* Robin Meuller shared AutoAPMS, which intergrates behavior trees with PX4.
* https://github.com/robin-mueller/auto-apms
* [Discourse post](https://discourse.ros.org/t/autoapms-a-unified-software-framework-for-creating-behavior-based-robotic-applications/41835)
* Michael is the new ROS project lead. Please connect if you want to give feedback on how to improve ROS for aerial Robotics
* Ardupilot Pierre Kancir:
* My blog post about how to use remote controler like herelink to share video ou passthrough any TCP port from the airunit
* https://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/integrated-remote-controller-video-sharing-herelink-siyi-etc/130034

### Guest Presentation

Guest: Patrik Pördi
Project: ROS 2 in the ARK Ecosystem ([youtube playing list](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BJB3OAo3tw&list=PLUepQApgwSoyIdgrab7oNXktWxaxzTcKm))
Link to Presentation: link here

**Questions from chat**

* What does challenged precision landing mean?
* That it able to handle precsison landing with sensor noises
* What are some example use cases for the LLM jetson integration?
* We are experimenting with various new models for automatic executing missions. Also we are using SLAM with LLMs. We also have a blogpost on deepseek executing missions
* Any particular hardware or sensors that you are excited about coming along?
* Yes. The flow and range sensor. We will come out with a high range for 70-80 meters range for that. Also a Jetson carrier board that will come out as well.
* I would like to ask about high accuracy object detection, how we can do it in our drone and what is the steps to do this?
* C++ is the faster for that. You need a good usb camera, with Ubuntu. But specific classification you'll need to make another classified model.

### Discussion

ROS2 aerial robotics at ROSCon 2025 workshops? (asked by patrik)

** Polls **
* ROS2 aerial robotics workshop ROSCON
* Good idea! 10 votes
* Noooo! 0 votes
* What should the workshop be about
* Beginners: 1 vote
* Swarms: 2 votes
* Communication: 0 votes
* Simulation: 2 votes
* Something else: (in the chat)

* Michael - A wide variety of people come to ROSCon. There are both experts, those that have worked in a niche and those that never have used ROS before. The workshop could tailor one end or the other, but usually the workshops are really popular since they are always sold out
* Michael - An interesting topic could be sim-to-real, which is something that mentioned in the presentation is what aerial robotics need to particulairly deal with. This will be intersting for more people in the robotics community
* Mayank: You could take a look at the Zenoh workshop at ROSCon India and take that as a template. They started with theory first, had some tutorial examples, and managed to go to advanced features as well. There was a lot of open discussion and active partisipation, so people of different expertise levels could jump in. You can consider rkeeping it open-ended to accomendate different backgrounds. Or else it will be too boring for experienced developers or too complicated for beginners. So to incorperate discussion sessions is a very engaging way to do that (and Zenoh did that very well).
* Patrik: Those are some good ideas, so we can take a look at previous workshops.
* Don: I'd like to add that coming from embedded and automotive, aerial robotics is not beginner friendly. There are so many items that we don't know anything about. A beginner workshop would be great to get a good start in it. For instance, it's very difficult to access which hardware is necessary and affordable as well, since I don't only want to work in simulation
* Patrik: The idea is that we could bring some hardware either from Ark electonics, or have a cage with Crazyflies (which might be safer). But yes I agree that the depth is quite hard.
* Michael - Breath rather than depth is better for workshops. If the workshops is one step builds on another then people get lost quickly and can't keep up, therefor feel discouraged. If you have 4 hours for a workshop, try to focus on 4 different things
* Kimberly: Don, I've added the aerial robotics landscape in the chat that we made as a group for people to know resources to get started. It's https://ros-aerial.github.io/aerial_robotic_landscape/. Also the keynot that Ramon gave at [ROSCOn 2023](https://roscon.ros.org/2023/) was exactly on how difficult it is for experienced robotist to get started aerial robotics (https://vimeo.com/879001926)
* Chat question by Abdallatif: I have struggle between connect between object detection with ros and get information from sensor using for agricultural spraying so, what do you offer me to do?
* Patrik: You should have a pipeline where you have all of these componoents speerately and combine those with the kinds of sensors. Parallism is important and you should right down the details of that pipeline and then you can think about intergrations. And ask questions, lot's of questions, either on ROS discord or Dronecode discord.
* Kimberly: Robotics stack exchange is also a place where you can ask these questions. https://robotics.stackexchange.com/. For aerial robotics it's a bit slow with answering but I've tried to divert some of the questions to the right forums at least.
* Chat question from andrew: I am andrew. This year, I'm join MS degree for studying drone swarm. I want to hear about yours thought about swarm drone. Just anything like a good or not good. It's okay. I just want to hear about normal opinion, appriciate it.
* Kimberly: The Crazyflie for indoor swarms is very suitable. I am a maintainer of a package called Crayswarm2, but that runs ROS outside of the drone, not on.
* Patrik: I worked with PX4 and ROS with a swarm of . Namespaes is important, but that depends on which swarm you are using. Distributed swarms are very interesting from science perspective, like they are collaboratively doing a mission together.
* Chat comment from Pierre: Both px4 and ArduPilot wiki aren't great from almost ready to fligh options...
* Patrik: No indeed, and that is something we can improve as a community to make that better. It's not easy for beginners to know and ROS and all of the other things
* Kimberly. In aerial robotics in practise you'll need to just suffer for a couple of years and read error cordes and debug and if you are able to fix issues in just a few days instead of weeks that's a win... this needs to be better.
* Chat comment from Aniruddha : A tutorial on PX4 hardware in the loop simulation would be nice!
* Chat comment Damien: Maybe we could also have a Field Robotics workshop in ROSCon, so that subjects about deploying UAVs and UGVs in the field could be discussed altogether
* Kimberly: aerial robotics is quite complicated by itself so it's good to start form there... but perhaps for the years after we can have a by air, by land, by water workshop?
* Patrik: or have the workshop seperately and then afterwards have a discussion together, where they discuss the difficulties and challenges in that in what people learn in those workshops how it can be combined (kim: a panel?)
* Chat question from Xiao-bao: Have there been workshops involving collaborative multi-robot teaming? An example would be a UGV that deploys a UAV and acts as a mobile command center.
* Michael: There have been talk or 2 of the subterrian challenge or the MBZIRC Maritime Grand Challenge competition where they had a stsation drone element. The subterrainian challenge had UGV and UAV teams and MBZIRC had USV and UAV teams (catamaran with a drone landing pad). No workshop has been done on that, but it might be a too of a deep topic.
* Kimberly: Sometimes some people from maritime robotics join these meetings and they have to deal with the different standards betweent he two fields which makes it even more challenging.

### Next meeting

We are moving the meetings to every 3rd Thursday of the month, still on 5 pm UTC.

Next meeting will be on **Thursday, March 20th, 5 pm UTC**.

: Pierre Kancir from Ardupilot (awaiting definite confirming)

Add the [ROS community event calendar ](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/embed?src=c_[e-mail]&ctz=UTC)to your calendar to see our planned meetings.
We also post an announcement [Aerial Vehicles category](https://discourse.ros.org/c/aerial-vehicles/14) on ROS discourse with the [wg-aerial-robotics tag](https://discourse.ros.org/tag/wg-aerial-robotics) about one week before the meeting starts.

<iframe src="https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/embed?src=c_[e-mail]&ctz=UTC" style="border: 0" width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

### Want to nominate someone/yourself for a presentation?

Send us a message on the wg-aerial channel (link below) we are always looking for cool open source projects to spotlight.

**👉 Reach out to Kim / Ramón.**

### Handy Links
* [ROS Discourse wg-aerial](https://discourse.ros.org/tag/wg-aerial-robotics)
* [ROS Aerial Community Github](https://github.com/ROS-Aerial)
* [ROS Aerial Discord Channel (Open Robotics Server)](https://discord.gg/open-robotics-1077825543698927656)
* [Aerial Robotic Landscape](https://ros-aerial.github.io/aerial_robotic_landscape/)

### TODO

* Fix meeting link so everyone can participate in the chat.