As an engineering student in a co-op program, work terms give you incredible experiences that can’t be replicated in the classroom. My co-op term with Thalmic Labs has been no exception! My name is Valentin and I’m a student at the University of Waterloo, working as a Gesture Controls Software Developer at Thalmic. Essentially, this means that I create applications for the coolest technologies and integrate them with the Myo armband. One particular project that I worked on this summer was the integration of the armband with the Parrot AR.As expected, flying a quadcopter with your arm is pretty darn cool! This proved to be an awesome project and was also quite an adventure, with lots of spectacular crashes, and broken quadcopter parts. Before we get to the fun stuff, let me give you a good understanding of how controlling the AR.In order to communicate flight commands to the AR.Drone, you have to connect it via a wifi hotspot. You can then set up commands to modify the pitch, yaw, and roll angles of the AR.

Drone to effectively control how it flies. You can control the pitch by moving your arm up and down, the yaw by moving your arm from side to side, and the roll by rotating your arm clockwise and counter-clockwise. google buys drone maker titan aerospaceWhen all of these angles are at zero, the AR.x rebirth where to buy dronesDrone will hover on the spot; x rebirth can buy droneswhen the angles are changed, you can control its flight.buy insect spy drone I started the project by looking at the existing open source AR.Drone Free Flight app on iOS. This was actually a nice shortcut in the development process for me since all of the communication for flight commands, which contain the angles mentioned previously, were already taken care of.

All that was left was to integrate the Myo armband with the existing app and figure out the best way to control the AR.Drone with my arm. After lots of experimenting, I decided that keeping your arm flat should make the AR.Moving your arm from side-to-side would cause the AR.Drone to strafe left and right, modifying the yaw angle. Pointing your arm down would cause the AR.Drone to move forward, and pointing your arm up towards the sky would cause it to move back, modifying the pitch angle. We can also make it rotate on its spot by giving it a positive roll angle for rotating right and a negative one to rotate left. Knowing what position your arm is in is trivial thanks to the armband’s motion API. This allows us to know what your arm’s pitch, yaw, and roll are in real time, and from that we’re able to feed commands to the AR.Drone via the Myo armband.Drone was just one of the very cool things which I’ve had the opportunity to work on here at Thalmic Labs, and I must say that this has definitely been the best co-op experience I’ve had so far!

Turning the Parrot AR.Drone into an autonomous UAV There are loads of open source quadcopters out there, but they're all a bit too DIY for me--I just want something cheap that works right out of the box. I love the Parrot AR.Drone, which fits that bill, but it's not really a UAV, because you can't give it waypoints and it doesn't know where it is since it doesn't have GPS. Adding GPS to the AR.Drone would be easy if you could get access to the datastream the AR.Drone is sending back via WiFi, and there is indeed a physical port that could allow that, but Parrot has not enabled that and they don't want to emphasize that possibility for fear that the AR.Drone might get regulated as a UAV, rather than a flying toy. So rather than wait for them to turn that on, I decided to take matters into my own hands. As you can see above, I just added an ArduPilot, a GPS and an Xbee to the AR.They're powered by a tap off the balancing connector of the quad's battery, but otherwise they don't have any connection to the onboard electronics.

(Note: you don't really need ArduPilot for this--you could probably connect the GPS right to the Xbee--but I'm using it right now to parse the GPS data and just send down the essentials, along with providing a power regulator for the Xbee and GPS module. But going forward, having ArduPilot onboard will let us add other sensors and do more onboard processing.) All this setup does is send back GPS coordinates to the ground station, with an Xbee at each end. But that's enough to turn the AR.Drone into a proper UAV, since Parrot has already released software that lets you control the AR.Drone from a PC. So all we need to do is modify that code to take the GPS telemetry in from the Xbee, compare that with given waypoints, and calculate a directional vector for the AR.Drone to fly to hit the next waypoint. Then that XYZ command can be sent back to the AR.Drone via WiFi using the Parrot data standard. So in a sense, the AR.Drone handles the inner loop (stabilization) of an autopilot onboard, but the outer loop (navigation) we'll do from the ground station, along with image processing and other mission planning.

Because the outer loop only needs to run at GPS speed (1Hz-4Hz), wireless latency isn't an issue. Right now, the only official AR.Drone PC ground station is for Linux (here), which is a bit over my head. But now that the quads are getting out to developers, I'm sure someone will port that to Windows, at which point I can have a go at writing the software to read the incoming Xbee data from the serial port and turn it into flying commands to send back via WiFi. 3 members like this < Previous Post Next Post > Sign Upor Sign In Or sign in with:At a recent hackathon at an internal Microsoft event, I got to work with the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 together with an amazing team of fellow tech evangelists in Microsoft. We had 8 hours to put together a fun project with some cool gadgets that were at our disposal for the day. The team and I ended up building a Kinect controller for the drone, essentially allowing you to control the drone using specific gestures in front of a Kinect for Windows.