Hector quadcopter not responding to cmd_vel messages

Question

I've been following this tutorial to get the hector quadcopter to work: http://wiki.ros.org/hector_quadrotor/Tutorials/Quadrotor%20indoor%20SLAM%20demo

I'm using Kinetic and I can see that the tutorial is a bit outdated so I have used

wstool init src https://raw.github.com/tu-darmstadt-ros-pkg/hector_quadrotor/kinetic-devel/tutorials.rosinstall

instead of the URL specified in the tutorial. catkin_make completes with no errors.

I do not have access to a controller at hand so I intend to use my keyboard for the time being. I could not find the pr2_teleop package mentioned for Kinetic but I found somewhere that teleop_twist_keyboard ( http://wiki.ros.org/teleop_twist_keyboard ) should work just fine. I start the controller using

rosrun teleop_twist_keyboard teleop_twist_keyboard.py

I have monitored the cmd_vel topic that, according to the tutorial, is being used and the telop_twist_keyboard node does publish messages just fine.

Here is a graph of my nodes that verifies the connection between the gazebo node and teleop_twist_keyboard using the cmd_vel:

However the drone does not move whatsoever and I can't find any error messages (besides one that says no joystick was found at /dev/input/js0) but I would not expect that to be the problem.

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Originally posted by mathiasi on ROS Answers with karma: 31 on 2017-03-09

Post score: 0

Answer 1

I stumbled upon this issue: https://github.com/tu-darmstadt-ros-pkg/hector_quadrotor/issues/66 Turns out that you have to an enable_motors action to "turn on" the quadcopter. Calling

rosservice call /enable_motors true

worked for me.

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Originally posted by mathiasi with karma: 31 on 2017-03-10

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 0