Packages Setup

We will need a number of packages for development. Here is a list of them.

• MAVROS: ROS package for MAVLink interface. It allows you to monitor/control your flight control from ROS.
• OpenCV: open-source computer vision toolbox available in both C++ and Python.
• RealSense R200 package
• other?

MAVROS

This package is used to interface MAVLink-based autopilots to ROS.

We will simply follow the well documented wiki on MAVROS github page. For simplicity, use the binary installation which is enough for most of the use cases.

OpenCV

Apparently, there are different ways to install OpenCV depending on the OpenCV version and your Python version, if you want to use it with Python. There are plenty of tutorial to follow and you can choose the one that suits your requirements. Normal procedures for general Ubuntu can be used. Here, one way is mentioned to install certain opencv version from source. Use the following shell commands to install OpenCV,

### INSTALL OPENCV DEPENDENCIES ###
sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall cmake pkg-config yasm libtiff4-dev libjpeg-dev libjasper-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libdc1394-22-dev libxine-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libv4l-dev python-dev python-numpy libqt4-dev libgtk2.0-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libtbb2 libtbb-dev

You can choose your suitable opencv versoin (check opnecv website) and execute the following

### GET OPENCV SOURCE ###
cd ~
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/files/opencv-unix/2.4.9/opencv-2.4.9.zip
unzip opencv-2.4.9.zip
rm opencv-2.4.9.zip
cd opencv-2.4.9

### BUILD AND INSTALL OPENCV ###
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local -DWITH_OPENGL=ON -DWITH_V4L=ON -DWITH_TBB=ON -DBUILD_TBB=ON -DENABLE_VFPV3=ON -DENABLE_NEON=ON ..
make
sudo make install

References

Here is a video for reference which explains how to install OpenCV on ODROID XU4.