How to control drone in VREP using a remote controller?

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hassanyf
Posts: 1
Joined: 06 Jan 2018, 13:25

How to control drone in VREP using a remote controller?

Post by hassanyf »

Is there any way to control the drone in VREP using a RC controller? I have a Turnigy 9x controller. Is there any way? There are tutorials on flying it via Python or ROS but none for controllers. Is there any way or tutorials?

Irving
Posts: 11
Joined: 24 Jun 2018, 19:55

Re: How to control drone in VREP using a remote controller?

Post by Irving »

This can be done and, I think from my research, all the pieces are mostly "off-the-shelf". As I don't know how much you know I'll start from the beginning of what I've found out so far (its something I'm planning to do in the future):

The Turnigy Transmitter has a trainer port to connect two transmitters together. The signal on this port is a pulse-position modulated (PPM) data stream for the 9 channels. The trainer port has successfully (with a simple hack) been used to drive a PC simulator. To get this PPM data into your PC you need an USB interface cable, or a cheaper solution is an audio cable plugged into your PC's microphone input and some software downloaded from SmartPropoPlus.

Both solutions emulate a standard Windows joystick and will provision the Window joystick driver interface. So the standard VREP joystick plug-in should work. The final bit - reading the joystick data and controlling the drone - I'll leave as an exercise for the reader, but the Python and ROS examples should give you a steer.

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