A little while ago we started with our second Project Friday; once a month (or so) we’ll lock some colleagues in a room with a couple of beers and a fun project. This project: give a drone a brain and an eye, so we can call itand make it do stuff for us. Why do we do this? Well, because it’s fun. and we learn a lot.
During our first session we mostly discovered how difficult it was to maneuver the drone around inside our office building. This didn’t put us off even a tiny little bit, we love a good challenge!
We’ve spend most of this session on thinking of a way we can use the camera on the bottom of the drone to make it follow a path we’ve laid out for it. If we put it simply: we want to make the drone to be able to follow a line on the floor. The first thing we did was create a line made out of white adhesive tape on our dark carpet. After that we held the drone above this line to take pictures. And then the thinking started… We had to make sure we took every possible deviation into account and thought of the best way to correct the drone if that deviation occured. Believe it or not, but this drawing helped us do that.
While thinking of every possible deviation and the correction that had to be applied for that deviation, we immediately programmed it into our Python script for the drone. As soon as this script was done, it was time for our first test flight. Which you can see in this video:
Ok… Not succesful yet. Enough work left for some more friday afternoons. As far as we’re concerned: bring it on!
Read more about what we did before
