
When was the last time you connected to something with Telnet? Here’s an example of how you would open a terminal and log into the drone’s computer directly. The Parrot runs a stripped down version of Linux.

It’s fun to Telnet into your drone and poke around. Luckily, there is a super useful project called ardrone-wpa2 that has a script to hack your drone to join your own WiFi network. Every time you want to try something, you need to disconnect from your network and get on the drone’s network. Getting startedīy default, the Parrot AR Drone 2.0 serves a wireless network that clients connect to. See Figure 2 for a diagram illustrating the architecture of the drone: Figure 2. In the end, I used Microsoft’s Cognitive Service APIs for this project because it’s the only API that offers custom facial recognition. Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Amazon all have fast, inexpensive cloud machine learning APIs. This setup led to lower latency than running a neural network directly on Raspberry PI hardware, and I think this architecture makes sense for hobby drone projects at the moment. I decided to run the logic on my laptop and do the machine learning in the cloud. I hope someone builds Javascript wrappers for other drone platforms because the language makes it easy and fun to deal with our indeterministic world. The last time I seriously programmed robots, I used C, where the threading and exception handling is painful enough that there is a tendency to avoid it. Node isn’t a language I’ve spent a lot of time with, but I walked away from this project super impressed with it. And trust me, while flying a drone, there will be a lot of asynchronous events. Javascript turns out to be a great language for controlling drones because it is so inherently event driven. I recommend buying two additional batteries and cycling through them while testing. The batteries take hours to charge and then last for about 10 minutes of flying. The worst thing about hacking on drones compared to hacking on terrestrial robots is the short battery life. While testing the autonomous code, I crashed it repeatedly into walls, furniture, house plants, and guests, and it still flies great. The Parrot AR drone doesn’t fly quite as stably as the much more expensive (about $550) new Parrot Bebop 2 drone, but the Parrot AR comes with an excellent node.js client library called node-ar-drone that is perfect for building onto.Īnother advantage: the Parrot AR drone is very hard to break. The Parrot AR drone I used is hanging on the far left. You can buy one for $200 new, but so many people buy drones and never end up using them that a secondhand drone is a good option and available widely on eBay for $130 or less.
#MICROSOFT PARROT DRONE CODE#
Resources: Get AirSim Drones source code on Github Learn about cognitive services on Azure Learn about intelligent edge devices. This is a great showcase of how real-time custom AI can run on edge devices, such as a drone.
#MICROSOFT PARROT DRONE PROFESSIONAL#
Most of the drones with usable-looking APIs cost more than $1,000-a huge barrier to entry.īut after some research, I found the Parrot AR Drone 2.0 (see Figure 1), which I think is a clear choice for a fun, low-end, hackable drone. The drone is then able to fly around and send an alert to Azure IoT Hub every time it successfully identifies an animal. Parrot European leader in professional drones Trusted & approved drones securing freedom across the globe Revered by the world’s most demanding organisations. Most of the drone manufacturers claim to offer APIs, but there’s not an obvious winner in terms of a hobbyist ecosystem.
#MICROSOFT PARROT DRONE TRIAL#
Get a free trial today and find answers on the fly, or master something new and useful. It also features autopilot in plane mode to keep it at a steady altitude.Join the O'Reilly online learning platform. When it's ready to land, it switches back to quadcopter mode to bring it down in a straight line.Ĭapable of reaching the same 18mph speeds as the Mambo, the Swing can perform a bevy of aerial acrobatics, from U-turns to half-flips to loops. The Swing looks like an X-wing Starfighter, and Parrot says it's the "first plane minidrone which takes off and lands vertically." It will basically rise straight up using its four propellers, then turn them horizontally so it can fly forward. Parrot is also launching its Swing minidrone next month for $139 (about £110, AU$135), a price that includes the Parrot Flypad, a new dedicated gamepad for the fliers. Compared to quadcopters that can reach upwards of $450 (about £345, AU$600), the Mambo is a relative steal. Priced at $119 (about £95, AU$159), the Mambo includes the cannon and grabber.

Though it's puny compared to Parrot's fixed-wing Disco drone, the Mambo can fly at speeds of up to 18mph and has a neat "throw to take-off" trick where its engines engage after you've tossed it into the air.
