Motion Capture → PX4 Pipelines
Running indoor flight experiments means solving the same infrastructure problem every time: get your motion-capture system’s position data into the drone’s state estimator. These two companion packages handle all of it — coordinate frame conversion, EKF fusion, and full-state relay — so you can focus on your controller, not the plumbing.
Vicon4PX4 connects to Vicon Tracker via the DataStream SDK (fully vendored — no system install needed), while OptiTrack4PX4 connects to OptiTrack Motive via the NatNet protocol. Both packages share the same architecture and interface:
- ENU (East-North-Up) → NED (North-East-Down) coordinate conversion
- Pose data published as both quaternions and Euler angles
VehicleOdometrymessages for direct PX4 EKF external vision fusion- Optional full-state relay merging fused EKF outputs into a single topic for logging and control
Three launch modes let you run exactly what you need: motion-capture client only, client + visual odometry relay, or all nodes including the full-state merger.
Vicon4PX4 has been adopted and showcased by Georgia Tech’s Indoor Flight Lab as part of its official codebase.
Built with: ROS 2 (Jazzy / Humble) · C++17 · Ubuntu 22.04 / 24.04 · x86_64 & ARM64