Do you have an AR Parrot Drone? How would you like your drone to follow your red shirt, or unique glyph photo. Or maybe remote control your drone with a joystick, wii remote or voice recognition. Even better, how cool would it be to have your drone remote controlled from another location over the internet? All of those scenarios are possible, but in this tutorial i'm going to cover the Color following ability. Below is a video that covers the next few steps.Step 1: Download EZ-Builder The software we will use to control the AR Drone is EZ-Builder. To download and install EZ-Builder: Scroll to the Download section Select Download from the EZ-Builder Robot Control Software Follow through with the installation procedure« PreviousNext »View All Steps DownloadDrone gets object-tracking hack & Wiimote control [Video]Drone isn’t short on intelligence – as we discovered in our recent review – but it’s also the ideal platform for quadricopter-based experiements.

Tinkerer Psykokwak has figured out Urbi integration – an open-source robotics software platform – to give the AR.Drone object-tracking abilities (in this case it can identify and follow a red ball) as well as broader control options, including a Wiimote, a joystick or pretty much anything else that can hook up to your computer, in a mere 25 lines of code. Video demo after the cut That last point might put something of a dampener on your impromptu AR.facebook looking into buying drone maker titan aerospaceDrone object tracking fun, since the quadricopter needs to be hooked up to a computer running Windows, OS X or Linux to run the full Urbi software. parrot ar drone in malaysiaHowever, that also means you can use the Gostai Lab software to come up with custom interfaces for the ‘copter, handy if you’re less than enamoured with the relatively basic UI of the official iOS app.parrot ar drone malaysia

Alternatively, Psykokowak has a second – more risky – method that allows you to load a version of Urbi directly into the AR.Drone’s own memory, running the software on the quadricopter’s own processor. The risk is that you might wipe Parrot’s original programming, and while the company is open minded in encouraging mods to the AR.Drone, that probably falls outside their warranty.You are using this software at your own risk. The authors decline any responsibility for personal injuries and/or property damage. The AR Drone 2.0, supported by this framework, is a TOY. However, its operation might cause SERIOUS INJURIES to people around. So, please consider flying in a properly screened or isolated flight area. We present a vision based control strategy for tracking and following objects using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. We have developed an image based visual servoing method that uses only a forward looking camera for tracking and following objects from a multi-rotor UAV, without any dependence on GPS systems.

Our proposed method tracks a user specified object continuously while maintaining a fixed distance from the object and also simultaneously keeping it in the center of the image plane. The algorithm is validated using a Parrot AR Drone 2.0 in outdoor conditions while tracking and following people, occlusions and also fast moving objects; showing the robustness of the proposed systems against perturbations and illumination changes. Our experiments show that the system is able to track a great variety of objects present in suburban areas, among others: people, windows, AC machines, cars and plants. This project is operative and based on ROS. It was publicly demonstrated in the 11th anniversary of the IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics, SSRR2013 (Linköping, Sweden). An explanation of the stack software and connectivity between modules are specified in the following documents and sites: This driver has been tested on Linux machines running Ubuntu 14.10 (64 bit).

However it should also work on any other mainstream Linux distributions. The driver has been tested on ROS "groovy". The code requires a compiler that is compatible with the C++11 standard. Additional required libraries are: boost and ncurses. To see dependencies upon other ROS package depends on these ROS packages: ardrone_autonomy, opencv2, roscpp, image_transport, sensor_msgs and std_srvs. The installation follows the same steps needed usually to compile a self-contained ROS stack. You can also refer /installation/installation_instructions.txt for installing the stack Install ncurses and the boost libraries in your system. Uninstall previous versions of this stack: Create a ROS_WORKSPACE to install the stack and the required external ROS packages and stacks. For example, A ROS_WORKSPACE can be configured in the folder. The following steps are advised: Download the required ROS packages using git: Set up the IBVS_STACK and IBVS_WORKSPACE environment variables.

Each time the cvg_ardrone2_ibvs is going to be used, do the following (note that the ROS_WORKSPACE and other ROS environment variables should not be loaded in the .bashrc file or other ubuntu terminal startup files): Download required packages of the Stack -> This step is slow, so, be patient!: We have noticed that it sometimes fails when compiling, because an error in the external package ros_opentld. If it fails, run "catkin_make" again. It solved all our problems for the moment! It is necessary to calibrate the AR Drone 2 camera, either as explained in the {IBVS_STACK}/ext_resources folder, or to copy the sample calibrations files located in ${IBVS_STACK}/ext_resources/ardrone2_cameracalibration/camera_info/ardrone_front.yaml and ${IBVS_STACK}/ext_resources/ardrone2_cameracalibration/camera_info/ardrone_bottom.yaml to the folder ~/.ros/camera_info . In the documentation located in ${IBVS_STACK}/documentation/Coordinate_Frames/Coordinate_Frames_documentation.tex/pdf, this reference frame is called F_{drone_LMrT}.

The reference frame that is used to reference the multirotor's telemetry, broadcasted by the multirotor's ROS driver, is: The sign convention for the commands, received by the multirotor's ROS driver, is the following: In order to run the stack, it was decided to run each node in a separate tab of a terminal window. The initialization of the architecture is done by executing shell scripts that open a new terminal with each node running in its tab. The script that is available is the following (please take a look at them to understand how do they work): NOTE: all the launchfiles open a separate terminal with multiple tabs, where each tab usually runs only one tab. If you close the terminal tabs using the close button at the corner of the window which has multiple tabs, then only one of the tabs will be closed correctly (the one that is currently selected): The easiest way to do this fast, and cleanly is to: first, press control+c on every tab (navigating with control+repag and control+avpag), second, use the shortcut ctrl+shift+w to close first all terminal tabs and, third, ctrl+shift+q to close the las terminal tab (which closes the window too) including all tabs.

The following script might be used to send a SIG_TERM to all the terminals (equivalent to pressing control+c in them): ${IBVS_STACK}/launchers/stop.sh . The launch scripts have to be called using the following sintax in the shell terminal: Simplified instructions to work with the controller: We recommend experimenting with the AR Drone and the tracker separately before running the controller. Usually you can recover control of the drone at any moment by stopping the controller ('i') and entering hovering mode ('h'). All distributed software, except the packages listed in the following, are subject to 3-clause BSD license (see the file: LICENSE). This software stack uses other third-party open-source libraries (some of them are inluded in the soure of the stack as separate packages): Robot Operating System (ROS), license: BSD license, not included in the source of the stack. ardrone_autonomy ROS package (ardrone_autonomy), license: BSD license, not included in the source of the stack.