ROS2 support

[atilla bleda]

Is there any documentation on how to install it for ROS2?

[tpavlic]

@atilla-bleda At least for VOXL Flight drones (I haven't used VOXL2), the voxl-mpa-to-ros bridge is based on ROS indigo, which means that you're going to have to implement a ROS bridge to go from your ROS2 to their ROS1 if you want to use mpatoros. That said, if you are accessing the MPA named pipes directly (or if you want to update their voxl-mpa-to-ros, which they've provided source code to), you won't need the ROS bridge and can use ROS2 directly.

You can run MAVROS within ROS2 (it communicates over UDP to Mavlink). So really you just need a replacement for mpatoros or design your system to not depend on any of the MPA stuff.

To run ROS2 on the drones themselves, you'll have to do a docker pull ros and setup a docker image that includes ROS2. Then either use a combination of network traffic (MAVROS via UDP) and the -v flag in docker (to import the MPA pipes) to try to get around using any ROS1 infrastructure provided by modalAI. In the worst case scenario, you may have to update the voxl-mpa-to-ros bridge.

We don't use ROS2 because it's still buggy, but we did throw away the roskinetic image that ModalAI suggests using and rolled our own rosnoetic docker image, and life is much sweeter.