Starling Allocator

This project provides a method of automatically allocating a number of trajectories to the (mavros-enabled) vehicles visible on the ros network. This was designed for use in the Bristol Flight Arena as part of the ProjectStarling project.

This project was developed in conjunction with the GUI and a simple offboard mavros px4 controller, although it can be used on its as long as the interfaces are satisfied:

• Input AllocateTrajectories.srv
• Output SubmitTrajectory.srv

There are currently 3 supported methods of allocation:

1. manual where the caller supplies a list of manual_allocation_targets
2. nearest where the allocator polls for the current list of vehicles (topics of format /<vehicle>/mavros/...) and maps vehicles to trajectories with the nearest starting point
3. random where the trajectory list is shuffled to produce a random allocation.

Building and Running

Running Natively

First clone this repository into your ros2 workspace, and also clone the dependent repository

mkdir -p ros_ws/src
cd ros_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/mhl787156/starling_allocator.git
git clone https://github.com/mhl787156/starling_simple_offboard.git # This is for the simple_offboard messages

Then in the root of the workspace (i.e. ros_ws) you can build the project using

source /opt/ros/foxy/setup.bash
colcon build --packages-select starling_allocator starling_allocator_msgs simple_offboard_msgs

Then to run the project

ros2 run starling_allocator allocator

Running via Docker

This project is also available as a prebuilt docker image available as part of ProjectStarling. In order to run the project run the following (ensure docker is already installed):

docker pull uobflightlabstarling/starling-allocator
docker run --it -rm uobflightlabstarling/starling-allocator

NOTE: If you are running this with the ProjectStarling docker-compose, do not forget to add --network projectstarling_default to the docker run command.

Interface

The key input service is on \submit_trajectories which has the following interface:

# List of trajectories to be allocated to various drones
trajectory_msgs/JointTrajectory[] trajectories

# List of trajectory types (i.e. position or attitude)
string[] trajectory_types

# Manual Allocation vehicle names in order
string[] manual_allocation_targets

# Allocation method (e.g. manual or nearest or random)
string method

# Interpolation method (e.g. linear or cubic or other, defaults to cubic)
string interpolation_method

# Automatically arm and takeoff (default true)
bool auto_arm

# Automatically takeoff (default true)
bool auto_takeoff
---

bool success
string message
Allocation[] allocation

There must be at least 1 trajectory in the trajectories list with a matching trajectory type, otherwise an error will be returned. The interpolation_method, auto_arm and auto_takeoff fields are directly passed to the controller.