ardrone-webflight

Pilot the AR.Drone 2.0 directly from your browser. Extend the application with plugins to add features such as video recording, autonomous flight, face recognition, and more. It makes it a very friendly environment to quickly build and experiment with your drone (e.g. during a nodecopter event).

If you encounter an issue; please submit it to the issue tracker! You can also catch up with me (eschnou) on twitter or on #freenode (channel #nodecopter).

This branch is the development branch, there are no packaged release yet.

Built-in plugins

• video-png stream the video to the browser through static image loading, works great in every browser. Requires ffmpeg installed on your system.

• video-stream use node-dronestream to stream the raw h264 video feed via webscokets and rendering in Javascript !!! Need a modern browser and CPU.

• hud to visualize a head-up display with artificial horizon, compass, altimeter, etc. Based on nodecopter-cockpit

• pilot to control the drone remotely using the keyboard. Based on drone-browser.

• battery display a battery widget in the top bar.

• blackbox records all mission data (raw video, navdata, etc.) on the disk.

• replay replays a mission by injecting the data at the client level. Makes it a very friendly tool to code/test/debug when you can't fly. You need to use video-png for video, not compatible with video-stream yet.

Other plugins

Feel free to add your plugins in this list by editing this page.

• copterface detect faces and track them by rotating the drone. A port of the copterface project to the webflight environment.

• traffic displays live Air traffic from ADS-B data as an augmented reality overlay.

• gamepad controls the drone with a gamepad.

• tracker track pixels on the videostream by clicking on them.

Install

WebFlight requires a recent nodejs (built and tested with node > 0.10) as well as npm and bower for dependency management.

In order to use the video-png plugin, you also need ffmpeg installed on your system.

git clone https://github.com/eschnou/ardrone-webflight.git
cd ardrone-webflight
npm install
bower install

Usage

1. Copy the config.js.sample to config.js and edit to select your plugins
2. Connect to the drone's wifi
3. Run node app.js
4. Point your browser to http://localhost:3000/

Controlling the drone

If you have enabled the pilot plugin, you can fly the drone with the following keys. You can define your keyboard in the config file. In the plugin, azerty and qwerty keyboards are defined. Feel free to define others.

Use z, s, q, d to move front, back and sideways. Use your cursors to go up/down or turn clockwise/counter clockwise. Use t to takeoff and l for landing.

Use the tab key to toggle acceleration speed slow/fast.

Use the f key to perform a flip in the current direction of movement.

Record a mission

Just press the r to start recording. A popup alers you when the recording starts. Press r again to stop. Each mission is bundled in its own folder.

Adding your own plugin

There is no tutorial yet, in the meanwhile, just have a look at the built in plugins, it is faily straightforward.

Thanks

This work is based on the integration of nodecopter-cockpit and drone-browser, refactored in a plugin architecture. Thanks to @bkw and @functino for sharing! Also a big thank you to @felixge for his node-ar-drone library which pushed me into buying a drone and become crazy about these little flying robots!

License

The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2013 by the AUTHORS

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.