Experience using AR.Drone 2.0 in conjunction with Windows

Why AR.Drone 2.0, not DJI Phantom, or Walkera

There are a huge number of quadcopters on the market, and tiny, but cheap Hubsans, and quite large DJI Phantom which are considered to be the benchmark of a quadcopter, and Walkera, which are optimal in price, and many other models. But what makes AR.Drone stand out among all this diversity for me personally, of course, this is a WI-FI control with the maturity of real-time video transmission over it. Those. AR.Drone is the only quadcopter that can be bought without a soldering iron and connected to a computer, and here you can do anything, from simple control with a joystick or mouse to autonomous flights based on video from a camera and 3D space reconstruction.

How I taught AR.Drone to Windows

By default, the control of the device is assumed from a tablet or phone (any OS except wp 7.8) and when buying, the sellers offer to install and configure everything, but this option is not for us, and generally it’s not a perversion to control the quadcopter when poking into a small screen sticks under the fingers. After unpacking and first connecting the battery, the Drone immediately appeared among the WI-FI networks and the laptop connected to it without problems. It was possible to come to the software part. The development of a management program was assumed exclusively in C # and the search led to two existing projects:

• AR.FreeFlight http://projects.ardrone.org/projects/show/ardrone-api
• Ruslan-B / AR.Drone http://github.com/Ruslan-B/AR.Drone

The second set of libraries seemed to me simpler in understanding and not so loaded, besides they were desktop while AR.FreeFlight under runtime and the choice fell on Ruslan-B / AR.Drone. And what is surprising is there is still no decent program for Windows with the ability to control from a joystick or gamepad. A week of evenings spent on developing a library + program with control from a gamepad, telemetry output over video, calculating flight time, sound notification and everything I needed for flying turned out. But the most important thing is that you can use computer vision and implement an autonomous field, since the library provides video bitmap and telemetry bitmap, and receives the control vector. I don’t think the libraries and the program itself should be described in this post as it is a separate and complex topic. An example of superimposed telemetry in the photo. The program is called IsDrone, the source code and the installer are http://isdrone.codeplex.com.

How and by what I fly

The first flight under control was made from a laptop and gamepad, in general, everything is acceptable except for the weight of the laptop and its dimensions. A more convenient option turned out to be using a tablet on Windows 8.1 which easily fits in a backpack along with Drone, batteries and all other accessories. The overall flight kit looks like this.
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All this fits perfectly into a small backpack from a 13-inch laptop and weighs 1 kilogram. Control is similar to mode 2 and against the background of smaller quadrocopters, Dron is very easy to control and is generally very stable (the video of the hangup on the ground is shown below). After connecting and checking the work, the tablet is usually sent to a backpack that hangs behind your back and is controlled by eye contact without the use of FPV, and sometimes the tablet is given into the hands of children, who certainly appear nearby, and they watch “live broadcast from the sky”.

Video recording

In addition to the pampering and research interest, AR.Drone is also suitable for shooting video, because without additional expenses and working with a soldering iron, you get the opportunity to record video while seeing that you are real-time in real time (of course not DJI Phantom with a gimbal, but also a price of 5 -8 times less). But alas, the built-in Drone camera is still not of the best quality and for recording it is better to use an additional camera like GoPro or the Chinese equivalent of SJ4000.

General opinion

AR.Drone 2.0 is unique with a computer vision and robotics research gadget that can be easily linked to a computer. In addition, it is just easy to operate and stable quadcopter with a very attractive price. By the way, the price in one of the shops is only 8120 rubles, indicating its name will be advertising, but this is the real price, and not those who know 14,000 who ask for it in many online stores.