Ground Station

This section is for all things involving ground-based computers that are supporting the quad experiments. Apart from your own personal computer, you also need to have Optitrack (our motion capture system running on relay.local and mocap.local in Stanford Flight Room) setup and streaming rigid body information. More information on how to setup the motion capture system can be found in the Stanford Flight Room Documentation. In most cases, users only need to make changes on mocap.local, such as modifying and registering rigid bodies through the Motive Software.

The following software needs to be installed on your own computer:

1. ROS (melodic): For interface with mocap.local and the Companion Computer during flight.
2. QGroundControl: For setup of flight controller.
3. Terminator: It makes the multitude of terminals that you will be needing a little tidier.

ROS Melodic Installation and Setup

Please see the official installation instructions. Note that ROS Melodic is primarily targeted at the Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) release. Setup instructions specific to Stanford Flight Room can be found here.

QGroundControl Installation and Setup

QGroundControl is used to configure the quads. To install and run QGroundControl on your personal computer, follow the Ubuntu Linux section of the instructions page.

Terminator Installation

This step is optional, although we highly recommend that you use Terminator or a similar tool to monitor multiple streams of ROS topics before and during flight. Terminator lets you arrange multiple terminals in grids and save layouts. See the introduction page for more information and installation instructions.