few questions related to inter drone communication

[shubham-shahh]

Hi @bigsuperZZZX,
I went through the paper and the supplementary material attached, and the documentation does an excellent job of explaining everything in a lot of detail.
I have a few questions related to inter-drone communication

1. in the experiments you performed, were all drones connected to the same ROS master?
2. is there an explicit need for time sync between all the drones? if yes, how did you achieve it?
3. are we handling if there's some offset or delay in trajectories?

thanks

[bigsuperZZZX]

1. Agents run ROS master individually and communicate via a bridge we wrote.
2. We use ntpdate for time sync.
3. Of course because the global time is synchronized.

[shubham-shahh]

Thanks for the info, I'll understand the bridge communication and update this thread

[shubham-shahh]

Hi @bigsuperZZZX
I was wondering, initially when the system starts, all the drones will have a odom "0, 0, 0", how did you find the position of each drone in world frame such that, the offsets are added to the odom of each drone. is it made in a way such that they are equally placed away from each other and this offset is added in the odom from the beginning?

thanks

[bigsuperZZZX]

We do it manually

[shubham-shahh]

We do it manually

oh i see, so you transform the odometry of other drones in some central drone's frame right?

[bigsuperZZZX]

yes

[shubham-shahh]

yes

that's interesting, thanks for the info, I am facing difficulties in fetching orientation for accurate transforms, any ideas for that?

[shubham-shahh]

Hi @bigsuperZZZX
why is /others_odom being published from swarm_bridge and traj2odom_node I believe the odom published by traj2odom_node node is generated from received traj based on time allocations and the odom published by swarm_bridge is the true odom published by other agents, I am not sure why both of them are published on same topic and for drone_detect, which odom is useful?
is traj2odom_node only useful for simulation?

[bigsuperZZZX]

to reduce communication burden

[shubham-shahh]

to reduce communication burden

I understand, but the o/p of traj2odom_node is useful for drone_detect only right?