Google Summer of Code and Ardupilot 2023

Press

GSoC’23 (Google Summer of Code) is over for Ardupilot, but this weekend, Google is hosting the GSoC mentors meeting. This year Ardupilot was fortunate enough to have 4 students working on projects within the GSoC project.

Arsh Pratap worked on Improvements for ROS2 support for Ardupilot. His work was a continuation of his previous GSoC project which gave Ardupilot navitve ROS2 publishing capabilities by using an XRCE-DDS client. For this year Arsh added subscriber support, support for using a UDP transport in addition to the serial transport, ROS2 Service support, custom ROS2 messages and services. For more information on his project, you can check out his blog here: https://discuss.ardupilot.org/…/gsoc-23-wrapping…/105643

Asif Khan, worked on Camera and Gimbal enhancements, lots of little changes that were long overdue, things like pointing the gimbal to the centre of the circle when flying in circle mode, Pointing the camera at a lead vehicle when in follow mode, time base triggering, automatic start/stop of recording when arming, Mount point of interest code transferred to C++ from Lua. And lots of other enhancements. Check out his blog here: https://discuss.ardupilot.org/…/gsoc-2023…/105600

Pedro Fuoco contributed to GPS denied autonomous exploration using ROS2. his work aimed to replicate a 2022 GSoC project which used ROS1 and Google cartographer to localize a robot. His project is well documented in the hopes that other members of the community can and will replicate his work. If you are interested in navigating in GPS-denied environments check out his project here: https://discuss.ardupilot.org/…/gsoc-2023-gps…/101121/19

Shiv Tyagi centred his project around Multicopter swarm avoidance. He worked on adding communication links between vehicles, location tracking of nearby vehicles, path planning to avoid other vehicles in the vicinity and finally testing all of his changes. His blog has much more information on how he achieved this: https://discuss.ardupilot.org/…/gsoc-2023…/102108

Why is GSoC so important for open-source projects? Well, Google makes a huge contribution to open source by sponsoring these students during the summer to work on projects like this. This year Google accepted 171 organizations into the program with 967! Projects accepted for this year. Over 7K proposals were submitted this year to the program from 43,765 applicants in over 160 countries! Organizations as big as the Linux Foundation, Canonical, Python, Apache and other smaller organizations have all contributed over 2400 mentors to these projects.

This weekend Mentor Summit brings together hundreds of mentors from all over the world to an in-person summit to discuss how to improve the world of open source, how to collaborate between organizations and of course have fun in the process. Thanks to Google for sponsoring events and programs like these to give open source organizations a chance to get together in a way that would otherwise not be possible.