turboshrimp

Turboshrimp is a clojure library for communicating with and controlling the Parrot AR.Drone.

This code was originally forked from the awesome work gigasquid/Carin Meier did with clj-drone.

My changes are mostly about turning the code into a full-featured library for writing drone applications (like node-ar-drone), with the following specific goals:

Keeping the focus on straightforward drone control: I removed the OpenCV dependency and the goal/belief-driven programming API. Those are good things, but I think they should be in separate libraries.
Enhancing the ability to control multiple drones and receive telemetry from multiple drones: Replacing single, global vars with per-drone data structures.
Adding a clean way for applications to process drone telemetry, and parsing the full set of navdata options from the drone: GPS, magneto, vision, etc.
Android compatibility. I want to be able to use this code on Android using Clojure on Android.

I'm basing some of the new work on the node-ar-drone project.

Current status

Flight control works.
Telemetry works--even GPS!
Video works. I've tried two different H.264 decoders:
- turboshrimp-h264j uses the pure Java h264j decoder. h264j is a little slow and has some color glitches and occasional errors.
- turboshrimp-xuggler uses the xuggler decoder, which uses native code. It's almost twice as fast as h264j and its output appears to be perfect.
It runs on Android. I don't check every commit, but I do periodically test on Android. This code has flown a drone on an Android phone.

Example app

There is an example of using the library to create a simple ground control station with keyboard control and live video with an overlaid HUD: examples/controller.clj

You can run the example like this:

# lein with-profile example run -m controller > debug.log

(Hey look, it's Ralph & Dottie!)

Here's a video of the HUD in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mOtoYUoiWI

Once the controller has started, you can use the following controls:

Key	Command
t	Take off
l	Land
w/a/s/d	Forward / turn left / backward/ turn right
shift-a/d	"Strafe" left / right
q / z	Climb / descend
c	Switch to forward-facing camera
v	Switch to downward-facing camera

Testing

$ lein test

To do

Fix the inconsistent API. That is, some commands are functions, e.g. (takeoff drone) while some are sent using command: (command drone :navdata-options :demo).
Add some convenient handling of emergency mode, similar to what node-ar-drone does.
Test with multiple drones and drones that aren't at the default 192.168.1.1 address.
Consider whether we can make it a little more convenient to use video.
Handle blocking config commands and multiconfig (see felixge/node-ar-drone#76).
Make sure errors and other events are handled correctly and consistently.
Make it easier to tell if the drone is connected or disconnected.

License