Experimenting with the Robot Operating System (ROS) to enable communication between drones in the Dronology project.

Défense de mémoire d'Huseyin Eryoruk

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, more commonly known as UAVs, are becoming increasingly popular. In the past decade tremendous improvements have been made in every aspect of the domain, such as software solutions, hardware, design, etc. UAVs were being used for military goals first, before starting to be used for recreational and for commercial purposes. The needs are evolving alongside with the technologies. The current solutions are mostly focused on flying single drones. As the needs are becoming more complex, the necessity of flying several drones is increasing. Developed by the University of Notre Dame, Dronology is addressing this need. Dronology is a software for drone management and flight coordination using Dronekit. It allows to create flights and deploy multiple UAVs. All the commands are sent from the ground and the drones do not communicate with each other, a limitation due to Dronekit. Overcoming the latter is very important as it will make it possible to develop complex systems for monitoring, search-and-rescue, etc.
This thesis tries to address this limitation by using a technology different from Dronekit, called Robotic Operating System. The two main questions addresses in this work are : (1) Is ROS suitable for drone. (2) How to achieve data exchange between flying drones?

Keywords: UAV, drone, software, Dronekit, robotic operating system

Contact : Isabelle Daelman - 4966 - isabelle.daelman@unamur.be
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