Control of minidrones in Sphinx without bluetooth connection

ANAFI USA / ANAFI Thermal / ANAFI 4K
1

Hi!

I would like to control a Parrot minidrone in Gazebo without using a bluetooth connection (for instance, connecting it with ROS).

Does anyone know if it is possible, and how?

Thanks!

2

Hi,

Unfortunately this is not possible (and won’t ever be possible without significant changes into the simulated firmware).
The minidrones bluetooth interface is hard wired into the simulated firmware and there is no other way to control the drone.

Regards
Nicolas

1 Like
3

Thanks for the answer Nicolas.

I will then control it with the bluetooth interface.

Do you know if it would be possible to simulate more than one minidrone in the same simulation? We are trying to test swarming algorithms.

Thanks again

4

You should be able to run multiple drone instances in the same simulation.
You just have to add a .drone file in the sphinx command line for each drone firmware you want in your simulation.

This “multi-instance” feature is still experimental but it should work.
For minidrones, you would obviously need to have enough bluetooth dongles for each drone (and for each controller if you control the drone from a PC). This doesn’t really scale very well but it should work.

If you intend to simulate a large number of drones, it would be probably simpler to use simulated bebop2 drones available over IP at 10.202.0.[1-253] from the sphinx host. In this case and for performance reasons, you’ll have to disable the front cameras of the simulated drones.

Regards
Nicolas

1 Like
5

Hi,
I’ve tried to simulate two drones in the same simulation but I haven’t managed to see both drones available for the connection. It just generates one named "airborne_DA7113".
I’ve created two .drone files called “airborne1.drone” and “airborne2.drone” with different names, different initial positions and different MAC addresses (having 2 bluetooth dongles connected), changing only the parameters: “name” “pose” and “stolen_bdaddr”.
I’ve launched both .drone files with the following command: “sphinx /opt/parrot-sphinx/usr/share/sphinx/drones/airborne1.drone /opt/parrot-sphinx/usr/share/sphinx/drones/airborne2.drone”
Finally, I’ve verified that both drones appear in the simulator and steal their respective MAC addresses, but it’s impossible to connect to both because only one of them appears.
Do you know how could it be solved?
Thanks!

6

Unfortunately, there is an issue in current firmware that prevents us from having two bluetooth interfaces running simultaneously.