Control architecture for service drone in informationally structured environment

In this paper, we present a control architecture that enables a service drone to navigate in an informationally structured environment (ISE) and to accomplish a specific service task autonomously based on the ROS-TMS framework. The ROS-TMS is a ROS-based distributed information management system for ISE. It manages a variety of subsystems ranging from sensing by distributed sensors to motion planning and behavior control for service robots. The proposed architecture is designed as a component of the ROS-TMS, and consists of a navigation system that solves a path planning in ISE and a flight control system by a behavior-based finite state machine. The navigation of the drone is allowed by an optical motion tracking system consisting of distributed infrared cameras managed by the ROS-TMS. A graphical user interface is designed to provide simple manipulation of a service task by a drone. Service experiments have been conducted to validate the performance of the architecture.