Suggestion for designing UAV swarm
Before starting, YES I READ THE GUIDELINES "general debugging/programming questions not specific to ROS", I don't have anyone to guide and this one is my last hope, so expecting positive response!
I have been asked to design UAV swarm (two or three quad copters) in the following phases:
- Software in the loop testing to verify quad copters stability and communication.
- Hardware in the loop testing to justify model.
- Rapid prototyping for implementation
The objectives of the project are:
- Are completely autonomous
- Communicate with each other
- When sent to an area, they distribute survey area, perform operations (for beginners lets say they will record video of that specified area) and return to the base
- (If possible) Live streaming will also be done.
In order to do this project I have 2 options:
- I use ROS kinetic with Gazebo for SITL and HITL verification. Pixhawk 4 micro-controller will be used.
- I use NI LabVIEW for SITL and HITL verification. cRio microcontroller will be used with PIX provided by LabVIEW.
Personally I like option 1, I have googled and found some work on it (up to the point where a person is hovering swarm of 5 quad copters). But I am new to ROS (haven't used it before) so I can't come up with technical arguments to prove ROS/Kinetic with gazebo to be better option than NI.
As far as I know 'completely autonomous' Drones working in any area other than a cleared open volume is still an active research area. The collision avoidance challenge is getting there but as far as I know doesn't have a complete solution.
Yes and there are several methods introduced for it but at the moment this isn't my concern, I want to finalize one of the above mentioned two options. Since this is ROS forum, how do professionals see this project, I am interested in that.
To be honest, if you're new to ROS I would not advise you to start with a project as complex as this. It's certainly capable of achieving everything you want, but it will take time to learn it well enough to do this.
I do have enough time (at least 1 year and around 6 months), and I have to learn either of them problem is which stream to chose and why (with strong points). I don't have those points for ROS.
I am only familiar with option 1 so I can tell you it's possible but I can't give a fair comparison of the two. Give the amount of time you have could you not spend a month implementing a single drone experiment on both systems and use that experience to decide which way to go?
Amount of Budget approved for this project is limited to buy only 1 equipment. Also NI is costly (my rough estimation for price of one UAV is around $12 K. That's the reason why I am under pressure.