ROSflight 2.0: Lean ROS 2-Based Autopilot for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

ROSflight 2.0: Lean ROS 2-Based Autopilot for Unmanned Aerial V ehicles Abstract-- ROSflight is a lean, open-source autopilot ecosystem for unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs). Designed by researchers for researchers, it is built to lower the barrier to entry to UA V research and accelerate the transition from simulation to hardware experiments by maintaining a lean (not full-featured), well-documented, and modular codebase. This publication builds on previous treatments and describes significant additions to the architecture that improve the modularity and usability of ROSflight, including the transition from ROS 1 to ROS 2, supported hardware, low-level actuator mixing, and the simulation environment. We believe that these changes improve the usability of ROSflight and enable ROSflight to accelerate research in areas like advanced-air mobility. Hardware results are provided, showing that ROSflight is able to control a multirotor over a serial connection at 400 Hz while closing all control loops on the companion computer . In recent years, interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs) has increased significantly. Technological advances have enabled numerous applications of UA Vs, including package delivery, photography, search-and-rescue, firefighting, as well as military applications. Advanced air mobility (AAM), a category broadly referring to increasing autonomy in urban areas for civilian use, is also currently an area of high interest.