Unfortunately the changes made to tum-vision/ardrone_autonomy is not in the form of a github fork, so it is not possible to track changes with respect to the original repo easily.
I manually performed a diff between the two (tum-vision/ardrone_autonomy is based on the Fuerte branch of AutonomyLab/ardrone_autonomy). Here is the diff between tum-vision/ardrone_autonomy@be96c3 and AutonomyLab/ardrone_autonomy@Fuerte. The diff can be summarized as follows: (You can safely ignore changes in autoconf.h and README).
tum-vision's version includes a new set of calibration files for the cameras. Those are probably better than the original files shipped with the driver. The way the fork reads these files are different. They are being loaded from a custom location.
tum-vision's version sets the value of realtime_navdata and realtime_video to true by default.
tum-vision's version sets new default values for some of ardrone's control parameters.
Based on these observations, it is possible to use the latest version of ardrone_autonomy (1.4) instead of this fork in catkin based ROS releases. I would suggest that you apply changes in (2) and (3) to your launch file (which is quite straightforward). For (1), you can use the files provided by tum-vision's package and copy them to ~/.ros/camera_info folder as described here. A better way to handle this might be to implement custom calibration files feature, also suggested here.
If this works out fine for you, you can contribute your launch file and maybe your HOWTO to ardrone_autonomy package. I will be more than happy to merge them in. In addition, you can also contribute back to tum_ardone package by updating its documentation.
