# ROS Aerial Community Work Group


## Meeting Notes - January 22nd, 2025

Forum Post: https://discourse.ros.org/t/aerial-robotics-meeting-january-22nd-2025/41535/

**Hosts**
* Kimberly McGuire
* Ramón Roche

**Attendees**
* Yves Albers - Co-founder and CTO of Roboto AI
* Benji Barash - Co-founder and CEO of Roboto AI
* Arnaud Taffanel - Co-founder and developer Bitcraze
* Davide Iafrate - Robotics Software Engineer at Duckietown Inc.
* Alexis Guijarro - Embedded Engineer at 3DR, Inc.
* Kousheek Chakraborty - Robotics Researcher at Smart Research group

## Agenda

* Announcements
* Roundtable
* Future Events
* Guest Presentation

### Announcements

* Happy new year!
* Kim is a 'private citizen' now
* We are trying out a new noting system now instead of slides for easier note taking. Link is https://hackmd.io/@yQAyqQaBSrCT2YGqySXo0A/HkEFoBTv1g/edit
* **FOSDEM 2025** Robotics and Development Room with Two aerial robotics talks about Aerial Robotics.
* See the schedule here: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/robotics/. Live recording is available

<img src="https://fosdem.org/2025/events/attachments/fosdem-2025-6590-welcome-to-the-robotics-and-simulation-devroom/slides/104133/Fosdev-13_sHO5IRt.jpg" alt="drawing" width="350"/><img src="https://fosdem.org/2025/events/attachments/fosdem-2025-6590-welcome-to-the-robotics-and-simulation-devroom/slides/104133/Fosdev-11_Tk8G3Ir.jpg" alt="drawing" width="350"/>

* More events we will talk about later :wink:

### Roundtable
* Who is working on what project?
* Has somebody seen another project?
* Any request for help on a project?

### Events in 2025

* [FOSDEM](https://fosdem.org/2025/) 1-2nd of Feb, Brussels, Belgium
* [Xponential EU](https://www.xponential-europe.com/) Feb 17-20, Dusseldorf, Germany
* [ICUAS](https://uasconferences.com/2024_icuas/) May 14-17, Charlotte, USA
* [Xponential](https://xponential.org/) May 19-20 Houston, USA
* [ICRA](https://2025.ieee-icra.org/) May 19-23, Atlanta, USA
* ROSCon October, Singapore, ""
* [IROS](http://www.iros25.org/), Oct 19-25, Hanzhou, China
* [IMAV](https://www.imavs.org/imav2025/), Nov 10-14, San Andres Cholula, Mexico
* *Anyone knows of any other UAV/drone related events or competitions?*

### Guest Presentation

Guest: Kousheek Chakraborty
Project: [NMPC PX4 + ROS 2 Tractory Tracking Controller](https://github.com/kousheekc/nmpc_px4_ros2)
Link to Presentation: link here

**Questions from chat**
**Q:** Did it solve the water jet problem and the drone keeps its position ?

**R:** YES, we are working on the paper, we will be sharing videos on discord soon.

**Q:** to understand how nmpc performs better than mpc, can you explain how would mpc behave when told to follow this '8' trajectory?

**R:** The solver linearizes the trajectory, and it follows that

**Q:** how exactly do you measure 'how good' this nmpc controller is?

**R:** the simplest way is to measure the root square error vs the route based trajectory

**Q:** What is the direct controlling of actuators? Is it PWM?

**R:** We are not controlling at the PWM level. The api allows you to control the RPM.

**Q:** Were there any issues related to delay between FC and companion computer?

**R:** Jetson board with FC intergrated directly with UDP intergrated

**Q:** At what frequency does the nmpc run?

**R:** 200hz it can be faster, but we locked this number

**Q:** For the wildfire use case, how do you perform the visual odometry in smoke and account for high winds?
**R:** Outdoors it is based on RTK GPS, but VO is included. In Simulation there is a gazebo environment which simulates winds and it works fine with that.

**Q:** What was the thoughest challenge to solve?
**R:** Being able to talk to the C code being generated, with linking ROS to it (integration). Also finetuning the weight of the MPC controller was compliciated.

**Q:** Have you considered the possibility of Reinforcement Learning?
**R:** Yes its related. But when working with a drone it doesn't make sense to run.

**Q:** can you provide the trajectory error for the proposed controller?
**R:** Yes, the package is open source so you can check it. I'll do it immediately and send it to you.

**Q:** If I wanted to deploy this on another drone (different size and weight), would it be plug and play or do I need to know precise dynamics of my drone?

**R:** You'll need to define the inertia matrix and once that is defined its pretty much plug and play.

**Q:** What can we do as the Aerial Robotics community to help you with this project or what would have been nice for you to know once you started.

**R:** Testing the project is always handy (for bug reporting). It would also be good to test this out with different types of drones.

### 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, February 20th, 5 pm UTC**

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?

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.