ARDrone quadcopter in robotics research
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Some time ago, we have started to work with the ARDrone, which is a cheap commercially available toy originally intended for augmented reality games.
The drone has an open API, which allows to read sensory data and obtain images from its cameras.
This makes it a useful platform for robotics research, and allowed us to use it in several proof-of-concept experiments.
For a brief introduction of usage of the ARDrone for robotic research read the article AR-Drone as a Platform for Robotics Research and Education   .
The SDK provided by the manufacturer was too complex for our purposes, and therefore, we have created a simple software which allows to acquire its sensory data, stream videos from its cameras and control it by joystick or keyboard. The software is available for download.
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Autonomous navigation
The sensory equipment of the ARDrone allows to use it in monocular mapping, localization and exploration tasks.
The following videos demonstrate the ability of the drone to navigate autonomously in indoor and outdoor environments.
The drone is controlled by Simple, yet stable bearing only navigation for land robots, which allows to traverse ground robots a given path.
The extension of the aforementioned method for UAVs has been described in the article A simple visual navigation system for an UAV .
Note that the drone uses just its default sensory equipment, (i.e. accelerometers, gyros, sonars and cameras) and no external position reference (such as GPS) is used.
Autonomous surveillance
In the following videos, the drone is supposed to take snapshots of a serie of locations.
In the first case, it travels between these points using the aforementioned navigation method.
In order to position the drone over the places of interest with sufficient precision, the planned path has to consider the uncertainty in the quadcopter position, see article Surveillance Planning with Localization Uncertainty for UAVs .
In the second video, the drone takes snapshots of places which are not accessible by a ground robot.
The robot travels autonomously to a predefined set of locations, where the drone takes off and moves over the places of interest.
While flying, the drone uses the robot helipad to determine its position relative to the robot.
Once the place of interest has been photographed, the drone lands on the robot, which then proceeds to another location.
For details, see the article Cooperative Micro UAV-UGV Autonomous Indoor Surveillance .
Formation control
The ability of the drone to track the ground objects allows to use it as a mobile localization system.
In the following videos, the drone keeps its position over a formation of mobile robots and provides the robots with information about their relative positions.
That allows not only to keep the formation stable, but also to adapt its shape to the environment constraints.
For details, read Coordination and Navigation of Heterogeneous UAVs-UGVs Teams Localized by a Hawk-Eye Approach .
Download
Before downloading the software for ARDrone control, please accept the following conditions:
- The software is for non-commercial use only. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
- For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
- If you want to use it in your projects, please cite one of the aforementioned papers.
- Send an email confirming, that you use it. Your email address will not be used for any purposes outside registering users of our software.
- Any of these conditions can be waived if you obtain written permission from the copyright holder.
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