DroneStick

Flight code to control a swarm of Crazyflie drones via externally tracked controllers.

Example usage

The flight software from this repository requires external positioning system for drones to fly. It could be a motion capture system, for example Vicon. The external controller could be any object with known position and orientation, for example, you can use a VR controller (its pose is estimated by HTC Vive base stations) or even another drone, tracked by motion capture system.

Vicon motion capture

In case if you use a motion capture system for crazyflie localization, install a ROS driver, crazyflie_ros, and vicon_bridge follow the instructions bellow:

mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src
cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/ethz-asl/vicon_bridge.git
git clone https://github.com/whoenig/crazyflie_ros.git
cd crazyflie_ros
git submodule init
git submodule update

Build package inside the workspace.

cd ~/catkin_ws/
catkin_make
source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

Clone the repository.

cd ~/Desktop/
git clone https://github.com/RuslanAgishev/drone_stick

Adjust drone URI you use in the launch file here.

And use our repository alongside with crazyflie_ros driver.

cp -r ~/Desktop/drone_stick/flight_code/scripts/interactive_control_vr ~/catkin_ws/src/crazyflie_ros/crazyflie_demo/scripts/
cp ~/Desktop/drone_stick/flight_code/launch/connect1.launch ~/catkin_ws/src/crazyflie_ros/crazyflie_demo/launch

Interactive control example

Here we map a VR controller movements to drone position commands. In order to obtain VR controller pose information, follow the next steps:

1. Install HTC Vive SteamVR.
2. pip2 install openvr OR download the installer.
3. Setup VR environment. You can follow an example from Bitcraze.

Connect to crazyflie:

roslaunch crazyflie_demo connect1.launch

And run the flight node:

rosrun crazyflie_demo interactive_control_vr.py