AR.Drone Autonomy

An autonomous flight library for the AR.Drone 2.0, built on top of the node-ar-drone library.

Instead of directly controlling the drone speed, you can use Autonomy to plan and execute missions by describing the path, altitude and orientation the drone must follow.

Autonomous means that this library will move your drone automaticaly to reach a given target. Experiment with this library in a closed/controlled environment before going in the wild !!

Features

Extended Kalman Filter leveraging the onboard tag detection as the observation source for an Extended Kalman Filter. This provides much more stable and usable state estimate.
Camera projection and back-projection to estimate the position of an object detected by the camera. Currently used to estimate a tag position in the drone coordinate system based on its detection by the bottom camera.
PID Controler to autonomously control the drone position.
Mission planner to prepare a flight/task plan and then execute it.

Planned features

VSLAM to improve the drone localization estimates.
Object tracking to detect and track objects in the video stream.

Documentation

API Documented in the README
Advanced Programming with Nodecopter on Slideshare
Blog post with additional example videos

Example

This module exposes a high level API to plan and execute missions, by focusing on where the drone should go instead of its low-level movements. Here is a simple example, with the drone taking off, travelling alongs a 2 x 2 meters square ane then landing.

var autonomy = require('ardrone-autonomy');
var mission  = autonomy.createMission();

mission.takeoff()
       .zero()       // Sets the current state as the reference
       .altitude(1)  // Climb to altitude = 1 meter
       .forward(2)   
       .right(2)     
       .backward(2) 
       .left(2)
       .hover(1000)  // Hover in place for 1 second
       .land();

mission.run(function (err, result)
    if (err) {
        console.trace("Oops, something bad happened: %s", err.message);
        mission.client().stop();
        mission.client().land();
    } else {
        console.log("Mission success!");
        process.exit(0);
    }
});

Applications

Here is a list of know apps built using autonomy. Please let me know if you build something and I'll be happy to add you in the list.

panorama autonomously fly to a given altitude and take pictures to form a 360 photo panorama.

Support

If you encounter issues, please add them to the issue tracker. You can find me on twitter (@eschnou) or on the #nodecopter IRC channel on #freenode.

Thanks

This work is based on the Visual Navigation for Flying Robots course. My eternal gratitude for their team to post lectures and slides on the web. I learned a lot from them.

Also a big thank you to @felixge who came up with this crazy idea of flying a drone with Javascript and building the fantastic node-ar-drone library.

Donate

If you like this project, please consider donating. The less time I need to work, the more I can spend on open source projects :-)

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License

The MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.