Autonomous Flight

Firmware/software/electronics/mechanics
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twh
Beginner
Posts: 21
Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2016 7:34 am

Autonomous Flight

Post by twh »

Recently, I bought Crazyflie 2.0 for my own project.
I wonder whether it is possible to run autonomous flight without human interference(e.g. w/o camera, controller etc).That is, the flight sequence (e.g. simple taking off and landing) in C language is hardcoded along with (or inside) the firmware by making use of the RTOS multi-tasking feature.

Thank you.
arnaud
Bitcraze
Posts: 2538
Joined: Tue Feb 06, 2007 12:36 pm

Re: Autonomous Flight

Post by arnaud »

Hi,

The Crazyflie has accelerometer and gyroscope used to maintain its orientation but it does not have any sensor (out of the box) to know how it moves in regards to the outside world. Integrating the accelerometer 2 time will give relative position but it will also drift very quickly. This makes it pretty much impossible to have it fly autonomously for useful amount of time before hitting something.

From my previous test, flying for a very limited amount of time can be quite predictable. You can try sending sequence of commands from python for example. I have tested programming "controlled jump". But if you want to fly more than a couple of seconds you will need some way to control the Crazyflie position in the room.

Once you have the Crazyflie autonomous, where the setpoint sequence is run does not really matter: if you can control it from python it will be possible to control it from within the Crazyflie (you can easily modify the "setpoint" structure in stabilizer.c).

There is a section in our FAQ that lists the kind of system that has be used so far for making the Crazyflie autonomous: https://www.bitcraze.io/frequently-aske ... zyflie-2.0
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