Netherlands
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Autonomous Parrot Ar 2 Drone Navigation

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Hey everybody!

First of all, I am amazed by how good your software works! I've been searching for software to use in a project for my university and ARC is by far the most promising software i've found.

So I have a few questions that i'd hoped you guys could help me with. For a project on my university me and a few fellow students want to use a drone to help people navigate within the school. To do this we are using a Parrot AR 2 drone, together with (hopefully) ARC. We have played with ARC for a bit to try and understand how the software really works. This went well until the point that we have to make the drone fly autonomously, why autonomously you might think? We want the drone to be able to fly to a given location within the school, by itself, without any user interaction whatshowever AND without crashing or being a hazard to people. This is where we run into trouble. We got the drone to perform a script, but for it to fly autonomously we need the drone to recognize 'danger' being people (automatic ascending) and close proximity to walls (automatic centering in hallways). Do you guys think this is possible to do with ARC, and if so, can you give us a push in the right direction?

Besides this; is it possible to combine different functionality of ARC? For example, let the drone perform a script, while using the camera to make sure it doesn't hit anything, give a led signal when the destination has been reached and then fly back to the starting point?

Im very curious what you guys think about this and if somebody is willing to help us out a bit :D

Lets end this post with another (small) question!: After I connect to the drone in ARC, and let it take off using my keyboard and then land again, the drone won't respond to any scripts I send to it, it will only listen to my keyboard and I have to reset the connection for it to execute scripts again, is there a way to fix this, so to make the drone respond to everything I tell it to do?

Sorry for the long post!


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#17  

For scripting, there are two ways to do it.

If you click the "gear" icon and go into the camera setup, you can assign a script when tracking has started ( a tracked object it detected) and a script when tracking has stopped (a tracked object is no longer detected). IN that same dialog, click on the variables tab and you will see all the variables available to your scripts related to the camera. Most are related to tracked objects.

ControlCommand can be used to turn tracking on and off or change the type of tracking you are doing.

Incrementing a variable is easy.

Initialize your variable at the beginning of the script. Every time you want to increment it, add 1 to the variable. To decrement, -1.

Very simplified Example:


$counter = 0

:Start
#do some stuff
#code for detecting your object
$counter = @counter + 1
goto(start)

Alan

Netherlands
#18  

@thetechguru Thank you VERY much for your help, I really appreciate it and you've helped me in the right direction BIG TIME!

I only have one more question relating to the use of the various scripts within the camera config window. The way I now see it, is that it is possible to assign a script or even multiple scripts, to be executed when camera tracking starts. I can also assign scripts which I wrote myself.

The eventual goal is to have a different script for each destination, in which the drone follows some commands to reach a destination, and then fly back. The script the drone will execute depends on user input. Can we make it possible to make the drone execute another script every time depending on some form of input by a user?

#19  

Or as Rich would code... :P


$counter = 0

:Start
#do some stuff
#code for detecting your object
$counter++
goto(start)
#20  

Quote:

The eventual goal is to have a different script for each destination, in which the drone follows some commands to reach a destination, and then fly back. The script the drone will execute depends on user input. Can we make it possible to make the drone execute another script every time depending on some form of input by a user?

The camera start and stop tracking scripts can only execute a single script each, but each script can execute other scripts, so you could have camera tracking (or a script which is monitoring the various camera variables) kick off a script which requests user input, and then the response to that user input could drive further scripts.

Or, it could all be one big script with Goto and Return statements, and various IF conditions.

Alan

Netherlands
#21  

@thetechguru I seem to be unable to let keep the drone hovering over the object, in this case a stripe of green on the floor formed by green paper. It recognizes it, but then starts flying around no matter what, losing the object in the process, while I want it to keep the green stripe in the middle 3 grid-fields (so the middle one on the top row, the middle one on the second row and the middle one on the 3rd row). After this, I want it to follow a movement script while constantely making sure the green stripe is in the gridlines. Any clues on how to make this work?

If it's of any value, I'm using the bottom camera of the drone.

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