Aquatic Surface Drone Mission Planning Tool for Environmental Monitoring

The lack of MAVLink support limits many robots and drones from using well-known ground control stations (GCS) like QGroundControl (QGC). Furthermore, deploying advanced GCS in aquatic environments is not a trivial task. To deal with these problems, this paper proposes the design of a mission planning tool, named M-Planner, for the autonomous navigation of aquatic drones in complex environments. The proposed tool is equipped with a user-friendly frontend interface, providing easy access to mission parameter functionalities, including grid spacing, restricted zones, and the generation of optimized waypoint sequences. On the other hand, the proposed interface has a backend module for processing aquatic missions. Another extra features of the backend comprises setting the home location, clearing old missions, and acknowledgment verification when synchronized with standard GCS (e.g., QGS), over UDP using the MAVLink protocol. Moreover, the proposed tool generates a Global Positioning System (GPS) waypoint file for drones or vehicles without MAVLink support. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed strategy, scenario-based simulations have been conducted using the realistic environment of the Gazebo-based Virtual RobotX (VRX), Robot Operating System (ROS), and ArduPilot-based Software-in-the-Loop (SITL). The obtained results confirm that the proposed tool is a good candidate for mission planning in complex environments not only for aquatic drones but also for other autonomous vehicles.