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Autonomous drone

General Discussion
Dimitris Dedousis
2015-09-23
2016-08-01

  • Dimitris Dedousis

    Dimitris Dedousis - 2015-09-23

    First of all i want to congrats all of you that you were part of the creation of this library! I was wondering, is there a way that i can upload code with basic movement on to the drone so it can fly autonomusly without the need of any external device? Just the drone. Thank you in advance!

     

  • PS-Drone

    PS-Drone - 2015-09-24

    Hello Dimitris,

    thanks for appreciation :-)

    Regarding your question, well, its not so easy, so the answer is yes and no.

    Out of the box, it is not possible to upload a set of commands to the drone and let it act independently without a connection to an intelligent remote device.
    But, as you might know, the drone runs a Linux and it should be possible to install python (somehow) on it. If you can make this, the next steps will will be easy: just copy the PS-Drone-API and your program to the drone, change the destination IP to the drone's loop-device (drone.DroneIP=“127.0.0.1“ (manual page 24)) and you are ready to go.
    By the way, both cameras are internally just webcams; if you manage to install also OpenCV on the drone, it should be a small step to create a full autonomous drone. (You don't have to encode or decode the video-stream, so that 1GHz-ARM-CPU should be fast enough.)

    Another idea is to install python and openCV on a smartphone and attach it to the drone. I saw python and OpenCV at Google's Playstore, I am sure, there are ports for other devices, too. Maybe a Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi or a TV-Stick like a RK3188-device (these things are pretty cool and incredible powerful anyway), powered by the drone's USB-Port, might help, too.

    I am afraid, I can't help you bringing python onto the drone (of cause I will try to help), but you are very welcome, if you need some help fine-tuning or even customizing PS-Drone.

    When you have some results, it would be great, if you share the steps you went...an complete autonomous drone is very interesting.

    Have a great day,
    Philipp

     

    • Andreas H.

      Andreas H. - 2016-08-01

      Hello Phillip,

      I know that it's a bit late, but I think I could provide some ideas:
      The AR.Drone has an unsecured telnet server (root access!) running on the standard port, which has already been used for killing the INIT process on the Linux OS to crach the drone. After half an hour of research, I haven't found any articles about full-autonoumus behaviour over this method yet, which really surprised me. Because of the built-in FTP server it's also simple to install python with that method.

      I highly recommend patching this security issue by installing a proper SSH server on the drone and closing the unsecured Telnet/FTP access, because this can not only be used for crashing the drone but also to hijack it by installing python and the PS-Drone library on the drone and then taking contol by running for example a simple GPS waypoint script.

      Andi

       

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