Drone programming: Hello World
De Vinci Innovation Lab, ESILV: INFRASTRUCTURE | June 2020
TO BE EDITED
This and other tutorials are under construction for September 2020.
Aim
The Crazyflie 2.1 drone flies a predefined trajectory. This tutorial will apply your code for Behaviour Planning onto a real drone. Behind the scenes, the Python code sends commands to the Crazyflie 2.1 via the Udacidrone API.
Portability of code from simulator to real life
You might want to develop such code. Are you fairly confident about your programming logic? After all, motors are sensitive and electronics break very easily. You can test out your code on a simulator before you port it to a drone. The github will be up shortly.
Event-based Behaviour planning
Introduction
How a Chatbot uses behaviour planning
A basic Chatbot needs to respond to user input over time. This means we need some kind of sequence.
How NOT to plan out our code: using variables as flags
This comes from a previous project I was engaged in.
A wheeled robot was required to rotate until it saw a face, and then approach the face.
This meant transitioning from start to rotate to detect to approach to stop.
The code for this will be available soon.
How we plan out our code: better flow between transitions
We use Python classes and functions to make our code easily readable.
Deciding when to transition
The transitions can occur according to some time or space constraints.
Takeoff transition
Waypoint transition
The waypoint transitions use some nifty code!
Safety Concerns
[Wrap the Crazyflie] [Disconnect the Battery]
Testing the drone
Connecting the Crazyradio
[Connecting Crazyradio] You will need to load the Crazyradio firmware on your PC. Please refer to the Crazyradio setup instructions.
Drone is assembled and default firmware is booted onto drones
This tutorial begins at this point. Else this is well explained at https://www.bitcraze.io/documentation/tutorials/getting-started-with-crazyflie-2-x/.
Turning on the crazyflie
[Turn on GIF]
Testing a keyboard control script
This serves to check if the drone flies correctly, before applying your custom code. The github will be up shortly. It uses the keyboard as such: ` def on_press(self, key): if key.char == ‘w’: self.mc.start_forward(self.velocity) if key.char == ‘u’: self.mc.take_off(0.3) if key.char == ‘s’: self.mc.start_back(self.velocity) if key.char == ‘a’: self.mc.start_left(self.velocity) if key.char == ‘d’: self.mc.start_right(self.velocity) if key.char == ‘c’: self.mc.start_down(self.velocity) if key.char == ‘z’: self.mc.start_up(self.velocity) if key.char == ‘l’: print(‘Kill engines’) return False if key.char == ‘q’: self.mc.start_turn_left(self.ang_velocity) if key.char == ‘e’: self.mc.start_turn_right(self.ang_velocity) def on_release (self, key): self.mc.stop() `
Porting your code
The github will be up shortly.