Improved drone reliability using a robot operating system

Abstract

We present a platform that enables a service drone to guarantee reliability for mission completion and to update an application while in flight, using a robot operating system (ROS). The ROS is a flexible framework for writing robot software. It is a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions that aim to simplify the task of creating complex and robust robot behavior across a wide variety of robotic platforms. The proposed platform uses the ROS and consists of a version control system (VCS), ROS Builder, Device Manager, and System API. A graphical user interface was designed to provide drone and system status and to manipulate the ROS Builder and Device Manager. Using this platform, we performed two experiments that showed that drone reliability could be guaranteed.