godrone

An open firmware for the Parrot AR Drone 2 written in Go.

Status

This project is a work in progress, but the following things should work:

• Navboard driver
• Motorboard driver
• Complementary flight stablization filter
• Gamepad control via WebSocket / HTML5 Gamepad API
• Basic flight!

A 0.1 release will be announced soon. It will come with binary installers for OSX, Linux and Windows.

Roadmap

The following things still need to be implemented:

• Ultrasound height detection
• Battery status
• Reset motor emergency mode
• High level API for writing apps
• Camera Access
• Optical flow tracking for bottom camera / better hover stabilization
• Kalman filter (supposedly better performance than complementary filter)
• Parrot UDP protocol
• Parrot TCP Video Protocol
• JS scripting

Motivation

This project is mainly a personal challenge I set for myself.

However, if it turns out well, this firmware may become a viable replacement for the Parrot AR Drone firmware, allowing for a few interesting use cases:

• Education: Demonstrate quad copter physics, by controlling motors individually.
• Autonomy: Write autonomous drone software that requires no Wi-Fi connection / client to be connected.
• HTML client: Control the drone from the web browser of any device via HTML / JS / WebSockets. No need for custom apps.
• Acrobatics: Teach the drone new acrobatic tricks and allow for more aggresive flight.
• Hackability: Easy support for additional devices connected to the drone (GPS, Sensors, Lasers, etc.)