Drone videos and photography are all over at the moment. Freshly budget-friendly and now widely available, unmanned aerial cars have the capability to capture views of the city never believed possible, and at the same time reveal to us things about how we live and move around. Since increasingly more people are requiring to the skies, here’s a take a look at the existing lay of the land for Toronto drone users.LEGAL AND WHERE TO FLYNow, there aren’t numerous tough guidelines regulating when and where drones can fly. According to Carry Canada, “if your aircraft weighs less than 35 kg and is made use of for leisure functions, you do not require approval to fly.” That doesn’t imply drone owners can simply do what they like.Transport Canada strongly recommends drones stay at least 9 kms from any airport, airfield, helipad, military base, or other airplane take-off or landing area. Which’s for an excellent reason. Last summer in Toronto, air traffic control service at Pearson Airport was forced to divert several airplanes to a various runway after pilots spotted a drone flying close by.

Staying 9 kms from an airport in Toronto is hard. As Global News reported in March, Scarborough is just about the only location within the city limits that’s sufficiently clear of aeronautics activity.The federal body that controls the use of Canada’s airspace likewise encourages drone users to remain below 90 metres and steer clear of freeways, hectic streets, populated locations, and crowds, lest something like this occur. Prevent letting drones travel out of sight, do not spy on your neighbours, and never extreme the chill of sunbathing monks.In May, the feds launched a series of public assessments with an eye to developing a set of laws for drone users. The same month, Toronto city council voted to study the use of drones in public places.Thanks to the drone’s unique capability to catch real-time aerial views, authorities have actually also revealed interest in their usage. Up until now, apart from a one-time demo, Toronto authorities say they haven’t deployed any remote-controlled flying vehicles (Edmonton cops and the RCMP have, however.)

The Canadian Military say they haven’t adopted drone innovation, according to Metro News.WHERE TO BUY DRONES IN TORONTOStill thinking about requiring to the skies? ar drone parrot bedienungsanleitungThere are numerous stores in Toronto that focus on drones. parrot ar drone brookstoneDrones Toronto sells airplane, accessories, and parts, as do Drone Depot and Canada Drones.The Apple Store, Best Buy as well as cam merchant Henry’s are in the drone video game.ar drone 2 reservdelarDrones aren’t just for photography, nevertheless. parrot ar drone price in pakistanIn Collingwood just recently, a group of amateur UAV lovers convened for among the first ever Canadian drone race meets. parrot ar drone 2 radio transmitter & receiver kit uk

A few of the specially-designed automobiles, which are piloted utilizing unique video goggles, can reach speeds of up to 100 km/h.Wish to fulfill fellow drone enthusiasts? parrot ar drone bestellen.PROFESSIONAL DRONE PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHERS AND VIDEOGRAPHERSFor the armchair fan, there are always these stunning videos. You can also hire professional drone operators to make a video for you. Sky Snap, Sky Eye Media, and The Sky Guys in Toronto all focus on UAV aerial shoots. Farm drones expected to take off Drone ships move closer to reality as Inmarsat gets on boardIn this post, I show how to get started: How to install ROS, how to make it fly, how to use a joystick using ROS and how to use OpenCV with ROS camera feeds. I also explain how to run ROS with Linux Mint. As some might have noticed, I initially wrote a post showing how to use the tools offered by Parrot to develop some program in C or C++ to make the AR.

I suggest you see this post first if you want to know how to use usb joysticks on linux. Fortunately, I was told about ROS a couple of months ago so I did not start to follow this tedious path only to make the drone fly by itself. I have recently been in a robotics conference in Toronto where I saw a lot of research groups using the AR.So I teamed up with a strong guy named Sebastien Audet and we began to learn how to use ROS with the AR.In this article, I will present everything we have found on the web and I will show the code that we implemented. First of all, If you want to install ROS, you will need a linux OS. Here’s the installation website. The main supported platform is Ubuntu, so I suggest you use Ubuntu. Since Linux Mint is very close to Ubuntu, and because we prefer Mint over Ubuntu, we used linux Mint. The installation guide for ROS is pretty much complete, so I suggest you follow it. The only problem for mint is that you need to override some export variables so ROS thinks you’re using Ubuntu.

To do that, you first install ROS. Then, you need to type the following bash command: This will show you the Ubuntu version running underneath your distribution of Linux Mint. For me, it was 12.04 (Ubuntu precise 12.04.2 LTS). With this information, you will append the following at the end of your .bashrc file. Note that I installed ROS fuerte, so you need to change “fuerte” to whatever version you installed. The first line will with make you load ros commands in your terminal. The next one will tell your ROS installation to act like your were using Ubuntu. The third will define where to go when you enter the command roscd. The last one will append to the ROS path list the path of your system when you will have ROS packages to compile, so any ROS project should be in a path in this export variable. When this is done, you will need ardrone_autonomy and ardrone_tutorials. I suggest you go there to install everything right, but here’s a list of the commands to bash in:

Ok so now everything should go all right. If not, google the error message, or contact me, I might have forgotten something. Some ROS commands might return errors like this one: In that case, you have to force the OS override by adding the option to the command, e.g.: Now if you just want to fly the drone with a keyboard, here the command: But if you’re here, it’s because you want to use a joystick (or nothing at all, like I want to do) and to use OpenCV instead of Qt in order to work easily with the image stream, right? It’s time to create a small project in python. In your manifest.xml file, placed at the root of your project, write: Just like in ardrone_tutorials, you should have a launch file. In it, it’s pretty straight forward to set the multiple flight parameters as well as the joystick parameters. Just read the example in ardrone_tutorials and you should make it work quickly. I refer to my previous post if you want to know what are the buttons and axis values from your gamepad.

At that point, you should easily be able to make your gamepad work with the drone by doing these changes to joystick_controller.py like changing the button and axis default values. When this is done, just run the following command: Now, how do you use OpenCV instead of Qt (yeah, the basic example uses Qt). You need to know that using both at the same time will not work well, because that Qt’s thread seems to conflicts with OpenCV, so OpenCV will crash randomly if inside the execution loop of Qt. Found that somewhere googling around, and it solved our problem perfectly. Here’s how to convert ROS images to OpenCV images and the other way around. This example is modified from ROS’ website, so go there if you ever need more details. And finally, here’s a a quick code to make ROS work without this Qt loop. First you remove the Qt timers and such from drone_video_display.py: And the following gets rid of the main Qt loop in a stupid way, but it will work as a good start point.