Botello

Robot Tello Drone

For the most up-to-date information, see the github repo: https://github.com/yoraish/botello

Notice: This project has been developed on old software. Namely Ubuntu 16.04 and ROS Kinetic. I have plans to migrate the work done to newer ROS and Ubuntu distributions. Please stay tuned for that.

This is an ongoing project in pursuit of autonomizing a small Tello drone. To date (2022-04-28), the robot can localize itself with respect to a visual marker and follow waypoints. The goals of this project are:

  1. Localize in a known map via landmark observations (e.g., markers, visual features, etc.).
  2. Navigate to arbitrary points on the map. Start with straightshot navigation and improve it with proper path planning in an occupancy grid.
  3. Experiment with onboard computation (Raspberry Pi Zero 2W?) for visual feature extraction and localization.

Let’s recap what we have so far.

About Botello

This will be populated in the future :).

Setup

My setup runs on Ubuntu 16.04 and ROS Kinetic. I installed PyAV with the following command: python -m pip install av==0.5.2 and my Python version is: 2.7.12. The backbone of our communication with the Tello is owed to the great work done on the package tello_driver, I cannot emphasize enough how great the work on this package is! It allows us to do so much with the Tello.

If you want to install botello:

For the following commands, you’ll need catkin tools.

# Clone/fork this repository into some location in your computer
git clone https://github.com/yoraish/botello.git  

# Navigate to the workspace.
cd botello/botello_ws

# Start by building only tello driver
catkin build tello_driver

# Build all the packages.
catkin build

# Source your setup file.
source path/to/botello_ws/devel_setup.bash # Or .zsh if you use that.

# Launch all the nodes (after connecting to the Tello via WiFi).
roslaunch botello_driver tello_driver.launch

If this does not work for you, then you should install tello_driver independently, then clone this repository, and finally replace tello_driver (of this repository) with the copy that you have installed independently.

I think installing tello_driver independently should solve some issues like

    from tellopy._internal import tello
ImportError: No module named _internal

If you want to ONLY install tello_driver:

To get it to work, I created a fresh workspace and installed tello_driver from source with the following:

# create some folder_ws/src, 
$ cd /path/to/the/folder_ws
$ catkin init 
$ cd src
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/appie-17/tello_driver.git
$ cd ..
$ catkin build
$ source /path/to/the/folder_ws/devel/setup.bash # Or zsh if you use that like me.
$ roslaunch tello_driver tello_node.launch # To check if it works.

To keep tello_driver in this repository without making it a submodule (this is not good practice, sorry!), I ended up removing its .git directory.