Loco positioning system update: Kalman, controller and TDMA

2016-10-31 | Arnaud | 3 Comments

Loco positioning system is still in Early access which means that things are moving fast. Since the release of the loco positioning system a Kalman filter has been contributed by Mike Hammer at ETH Zurich. The Kalman filter allows to calculate the position estimate in the Crazyflie and merges the Loco positioning system information with internal sensor to generate a much better estimate. We also worked on improving the anchor firmware, it is now ranging faster and we fixed a bug that was making the anchor hang sometime. Finally stephanbro on github pushed an improved position controller that improved the stability of flight a lot.

Because of all these changes we have decided to make a new video and to rewrite the documentation on the wiki a bit. Enjoy!

On the development side, we have extended the Loco Positioning system to position 2 concurrent Tags by using TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) where each Tag is allocated a time slot to use to range to the anchors.

This works fine for a few Tags, but does not scale very well for a larger numbers of tags. If you want to experiment by yourself there is some instruction in the git commit. Be aware that this is still experimental enough for us to break it without warning so keep track of the git commits when you pull the latest version of the firmware. Currently we are working on a TDoA (Time Difference Of Arrival) mode that will scale to concurrently position virtually an infinite number of tags, hopefully you will soon be able to see commits on that on our Github projects.

Controlling Crazyflie with the Specktr midi glove at Maker Faire Berlin 2016

2016-10-17 | Arnaud | Leave a comment

We have always been interested in controlling Crazyflie with various devices. For example we had the Leap Motion that enabled us to control the Crazyflie with our bare hand. Then we hacked a glove for Arduino day. At Maker faire Berlin 2016 we met the team from Specktr. Specktr is a midi glove and since our demo was controlled with midi we had to try connecting the Specktr with Crazyfile 2.0 flying using Loco Positioning System!

We met in the evening, after the faire was closed, and started hacking to map the midi messages transmitted by the glove to our midi to position ROS node. After a couple of mandatory crashes and crazy behavior (like setting the flight area way too big and sending the Crazyflie high speed away at the snap of a finger, too bad we have no video of that …) we had things working well and the glove could control the Crazyflie X position:

The second and last day of the faire we did a more proper connection where both X and Y could be controlled. The result is quite nice. It looks near magic, and quite fun, to control Crazyflie just by just moving the hand:

Speccktr is currently running a crowd funding campaign and we cannot wait to get ours to be able to hack more with it together with Crazyflie and Loco Positioning System.

Bitcraze demo at Maker Faire Berlin 2016

2016-10-10 | Arnaud | Leave a comment

One week ago we where presenting Crazyflie 2.0 and the Loco Positioning System at Maker Faire Berlin 2016. It was a lot of fun being there, we enjoyed it very much, and it also required a couple of weeks of preparation. The preparation was both mechanical and markerting: out booth was built with and outdoor tent frame and we featured the first roll-ups of Bitcraze history (almost felt a bit too ‘corporate’ for us :-).

On the technical side it was an opportunity to test Crazyflie and the Loco Positioning System in real event situation. This required stabilizing the system and testing it so that no bad surprises would happen during the faire. The result is pretty good: we flew more than 91% of the opening time, we had 2 fly-away the first day, fixed the problem and had none the second day. We were flying with 2 Crazyflie sequentially and had not broken any motor mount or other part during opening hours (some crazyness did happen after-hours though, maybe more on that on a later post ;-).

For our demo the Crazyflie was flying autonomously with the loco positioning system using the Kalman filter to fly towards a given x/y/z set-point. We made a midi-to-crazyflie bridge in ROS that allowed to give control of the Crazyflie position via a midi cable. We actually used a physical midi cable which was the safest and simplest. On the other side of the midi cable was a computer running a midi sequencer, lmms. Part of the sequence was playing actual music to make the Crazyflie dance and part was just silent movement. The setup looked like that:

Midi can encode notes pitch (ie. where in the piano you play) and velocity (ie. how hard you press the piano key). The midi track contained 4 tracks: X, Y, Z and LED-ring. In X, Y, Z tracks the note pitch converted into a position and we don’t use the velocity. The led ring track maps the note pitch to a color and the velocity to a brightness. It looks like that:

This setup was a bit of a test, we found it to be very reliable. Some functionality were implemented on-site after Friday morning experience: automatic landing when the battery was low and reconnect on take-off to allow taking off without restarting anything in the PC just at a press of a button. The midi link worked well even though it feels a bit hackish to setup a choreography like that. If you have any better idea what to use to make a Crazyflie dance please tell us!

Last but not the least we have share all the codes, files and documentation for this demo on github so that you can run it yourself with an loco positioning system. We also made a short video showing the demo in action:

Crazyflie 2.0 tested in wind-tunnel at Maker Faire Berlin 2016

2016-10-03 | Arnaud | 1 Comment

We are just back from the Maker Faire Berlin where we have met lot of interesting people and shown the loco positioning system. We have calculated that Crazyflie 2.0 has flown for more than 91% of the faire thanks to the autonomous flight with Loco Positioning System.

Our neighbor at the Maker Faire was Gerhard Fließ from Deskbreeze and he was presenting a mini desktop wind-tunnel:

This was a great opportunity for us to test the Crazyflie in a wind-tunel. The result is really impressive slow motion videos:

The wind-tunnel is mainly designed for education. The wind goes at 1 m/s which is apparently too slow for aerodynamic study but nevertheless we can see some interesting effects. Then the propeller pulls the air, we can see the lines getting tighter just before the propeller, this is a sign of higher speed flow and lower pressure. The difference of pressure between the bottom and the top of the propeller is what makes the Crazyflie fly. When the Crazyflie pushes the airflow, simulating a descent, we can see an oscillation of the air flow. This is most likely what can cause instability when descending fast.

We will post more about the Maker Faire Berlin and our autonomous flight demo in the following weeks so stay tuned. Thanks to all we have met, it is awesome to meet and talk about the Crazyflie in person. A mostly great thanks to Fredg (derf on the forum ;), that was there to help us during the whole week end.

Flying many Crazyflie with Loco Positioning System

2016-09-19 | Arnaud | 3 Comments

Until now, the Loco Positioning System have been limited to flying only one Crazyflie autonomously. In this post we will try to explain the reason of this limitation and what are the way forward.

The loco positioning system is based on Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radios that can very precisely measure the time of departure and arrival of a radio packet. This allows us to do two things:

Use these times directly to calculate the flight time of the radio packet. This is called time of arrival (ToA) measurement, it can be done by simply pinging one anchor. No extra synchronization is required.
Use the difference between the arrival of packets from two different anchors. This is called time difference of arrival (TDoA), it requires the system of anchors to be synchronized together.

The method 1) is simpler to implement since it does not require the anchor system to be synchronized, though it requires bidirectional communication between the tag (eg. Crazyflie) we want to locate and the anchors. It means that if you want to locate more than one tag you have to somehow share the air by not ranging all at the same time. The method 2) requires extra work to synchronize the system of anchor and is theoretically more sensitive to measurement noise. However TDoA measurements have a huge advantage: they can be made to work with unidirectional signal sent from the anchors. This means that the tag only has to listen to the air to receive all information needed to locate itself. This allows to scale the location system to as many tag as we want since adding a tag do not have to share the air, they are not transmitting anything.

So far we have been concentrating on ToA measurement since it could easily be implemented and gives us the best theoretical ranging performance. This allows to develop the algorithms to calculate position estimates and stabilize the autonomous flight. The problem is that, since we are just ranging as fast as possible with all the anchors of the system, one Crazyflie will take all the available air-time and we cannot fly another Crazyflie at the same time. We have just implemented a solution to fly more than one Crazyflie with ToA measurement using time-slots, this is called TDMA for Time Division Multiple Access, and it can be done without anchor code modification. We are working on the Maker Faire demo using this method and it is starting to work quite well:

For TDMA we define frame and time slot. One time slot is a space in time where one tag will be allowed to communicate without risking collision with others. One frame is a group of timeslot. Each Crazyflie is configured to use one time slot in each frame.

TDMA frame structure. Image from the Wikipedia TDMA article.

Normally implementing TDMA would require some kind of synchronization to make sure each Crazyflie knows when its time slot starts. With the LPS we are in luck though since transmitting time is part of the way the ranging is working: we do not have to implement new messages or even to modify the anchors to implement TDMA.

We chose the timer in anchor 1 as our master clock for TDMA. When a Crazyflie starts it ranges with anchor 1 which allows to get the current time in anchor 1, then the start of the next frame can be calculated and the Crazyflie can schedule to range in its next time slot. We range with one anchor per time slot and each time we range with anchor 1 we get a chance to re-synchronize.

The TDMA has been pushed to the Crazyflie master branch. It is documented in the commit message so please feel free to test it, report, and pull-request ;-). We have tested running in 2 slots mode with success. Very quickly though, when adding more time slots, the performance deteriorates because the rate of ranging per Crazyflie decreases. Then TDoA will lead to better performance which is the next target, after the Maker Faire Berlin :-).

Visiting ETH and pushing the Kalman Filter

2016-07-25 | Arnaud | 5 Comments

As noted in a previous post, Mike Hamer from ETH Zurich has been implementing an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for the Crazyflie. The beginning of this week I am visiting Michael at ETH and we have now pushed the EKF to the Crazyflie master branch!

Visiting ETH is really nice, and it is very impressive to see the Flying Machine Arena in real life. Though, owing to the Crazyflie’s size, we do not need such a big space and can work in a more regular-sized room.

The EKF has now been added to the master branch but is not enabled by default. It is currently intended to be used with the Loco positioning system (although it should be easy enough to integrate with onboard GPS, or potentially offboard motion capture measurements). While it does fly better than the currently used, offboard particle filter for autonomous flight, it requires some care to work properly. I am going to update the wiki description for the loco positioning to document how to get started with the EKF during the week. Our hope is that through community engagement and feedback, we can continue to improve and tune the filter, now that Mike has put the basic functionality in place.

The greatest enhancement is that the Crazyflie is now able to estimate its own position, without the help of an external computer. Coupled with the onboard controller, the Crazyflie can now fly fully autonomously. I have also pushed a new example in the Crazyflie python lib that shows how to send an X/Y/Z set-point to fly the Crazyflie, allowing it to fly through waypoints.

In the near future we (Bitcraze, and hopefully, the community!) need to work on a couple of more things to make it fly even better

Revamp of the controller: the current controller is a position controller, splitting it in two controllers, one for position and one for velocity, would allow for a more stable flight and to finally use TheSeanKelly new PID settings!
Implementing TDOA positioning on the LPS would allow more than one Crazyflie to fly at the same time
Implementing the new commander packet in the Crazyflie, python lib and ROS driver. This will allow us to stop hacking the current commander each time we need a new functionality (such as onboard position control) — and since I have push rights, only my hacks get pushed, which is unfair ;-).

Mike will describe the Kalman filter in greater details in a future post. In the mean time we will update on the progress in the Loco Positioning mailing list.

Comunity progress on Crazyflie internal position control

2016-06-27 | Arnaud | 2 Comments

The loco positioning hardware is now manufactured and we are working hard on making it available. Loco positioning is still in early access, which means that we have tested the hardware but that the software still requires some love.

One of the big features still to implement is a position stabilization and position sensor fusion in the Crazyflie. This has been worked on from two fronts in the last weeks.

Community member jackemoore has been working hard on getting the Crazyflie 2.0 with a GPS deck working with position hold. He is getting close to having a GPS position hold working but has stumbled upon some system bugs that have to be solved first. You can follow, or even better help out, with the development on the forum post.

: Crazyflie 2.0 with GPS deck

: GPS location in the Crazyflie client

Mike Hamer, from ETH Zurich, has started to implement a Kalman filter, based on one of his publications, for the Crazyflie 2.0 firmware. This is still very much a work in progress but the initial results look promising. Mike has found and fixed a bunch of bugs on the way, which has greatly improved the firmware quality and stability. Since it is able to fuse the position estimate with the internal sensors, the Kalman filter will pair nicely with the GPS implementation from jackemoore to add a new layer of stability, as well as with the Loco positioning system. In addition, the Kalman filter is being written in such a way that it should be easy to incorporate additional sensors into the estimate. Keep your eyes open for a blog post in a couple of weeks with more detail on the Kalman filter’s inner workings, and hopefully a fully functional Kalman filter in the Crazyflie shortly thereafter :-).

Bitcraze in China for Loco Positioning production

2016-06-13 | Arnaud | 1 Comment

We are excited to announce that we have just started the production of the first boards for the Loco Positioning system!
Since this is the first batch of a complex new product, we thought we should be there in person. This time, Tobias and Kristoffer went to visit Seeedstudio, our product manufacturer. It is always very nice to meet them in person and to visit the factory.
Also visiting the factory is always an opportunity to discover a new fashion style!

The first boards to be produced are the Loco Nodes:

After a minor problem: we specified the LEDs to be mounted reversed, quickly found and fixed for this first batch by the Seeedstudios engineers, the production of the nodes is looking good and the first 8 pieces are flawless!

To go with the nodes, we need to have the Loco decks. Like for the other decks we have implemented the test rig based on a Crazyflie 2.0 programmed with special flags for the test. We found some issues with the rig software but it has been quickly sorted out. So the launch of the deck production, tomorrow Tuesday, should be without any hick-ups. This is what a deck test rig looks like (note the Crazyflie 2.0 being attached on the bottom):

In other news we’re welcoming Aman in the Bitcraze team for the summer. Aman is flying straight from Kiruna at the very north of Sweden (before that from Germany and even before from his university in the US). He will be looking at improving control and stability of the Crazyflie. The fist step today was to learn how to fly it manually :-).

Loco positioning in LTH Math Department

2016-06-07 | Arnaud | 11 Comments

At Lund University PhD student Kenneth Bastone and professor Kalle Åström are currently using the Crazyflie and the Bitcraze ultra-wide band based Loco Positioning system as part of their research involving local positioning systems at Centre for Mathematical Sciences. We visited them a couple of week ago and though we would write a blog post to explains a bit how they use Crazyflie and the Loco positioning system.

lps-research-loco-positioning-kalle-åström

A local positioning system creates a number of interesting mathematical problems that PhD student Kenneth Bastone and professor Kalle Åström have decided to focus their current research on.

By experimenting with different technologies to create position estimations in 3D space they have come across a variety of different ways to explore indoor localization using a local positioning system. The origin of this work area was with optical tracking and localisation, it has since grown to include any technologies and configuration capable to be used for local positioning like radio and sound.

One focus area for instance is how to estimate transceiver node positions from measured transceiver distances, this is a key issue concerning for example radio antenna array calibration or mapping and positioning using ultra-wide band. Another problem is how to determine how many nodes the system needs to generate sufficient information and to understand how often the system needs to make estimations to work sufficiently well.

According to Kalle Åström solving this kind of problems regarding local positioning systems is one step closer to a whole new area of future applications. In particular it is a technology enabler that opens up the possibilities for new ways to study motion and/or behavior, for instance in healthcare or for analyzing performance in sports.

Recently Kalle and his team has had access to an Alpha Loco Positioning System, this has allowed them to apply their algorithm more specifically to ultra-wide-band based localisation. The algorithm is able to estimate the position of the anchors and of the Crazyflie from a set of distance measurements only. Using the local positioning system the Crazyflie can estimate its position by using the distances to the anchors and the position of the anchors in space. Here we have visualized the idea in 2D:

In this diagram the red point is the Crazyflie and the green and blue points are the anchors. We will look more at the anchor A3. If we see things the other way around, from the Crazyflie point of view, all we know about anchor A3 is how far away it is. So it could be anywhere on a circle:

Now if we decide to go forward a little bit, the possible positions of A3 is reduced to 2 locations:

As you can see in the figure, it is not enough to only go forward, we still have two intersection for the possible positions of A3. We need to make a turn:

Now we have reduced the possible positions down to 1. We are not done yet because in reality the Crazyflie position is not known but by applying the same idea to anchor 1 and 2 the system is constrained so that the positions of all 3 anchors and of the Crazyflie can be found over time.

The algorithm is already working with the Crazyflie and the Loco Positioning system and allows the system to find the position of the anchors and the Crazyflie using a couple of seconds of data while the Crazyflie is moving around.

According to Kalle using the Crazyflie and the Loco Positioning system has proved to have some benefits. It is open-source which means that it can be modified easily to fit the research purpose. It is also safe and very practical to work with: a test system can easily and quickly be set-up as the Crazyflie does not require specific protection for people or equipment around it.

Improving Crazyflie 2.0 flight performance

2016-05-30 | Arnaud | 8 Comments

While it is a central part of a quadcopter the core of the Crazyflie 2.0 had not moved since we released it. We deemed it to be good enough, it was flying and going fast after all.

Recently TheSeanKelly from the community did not hear it that way and started investigating the flight performance starting by the attitude control PID. The results so far are impressive!

Sean tuned the rate loop a lot, this is the loop responsible to control the angular rate of the Crazyflie in roll and pitch. Doing that and the attitude loop could be tweaked which we did a bit, the one responsible to control the absolute orientation of the copter. And the results is that two major issues with the flight performance seems to be greatly improved:

The take-off behavior: Crazyflie is currently not taking-off straight by itself. With the new settings this is fixed and at any thrust Crazyflie just goes straight up.
Attitude control: We had a lot of overshot in the attitude control. Basically it means that if you go forward 10 degrees and request 0 degree (level) the Crazyflie will overshoot with a negative angle causing it to stop. With the new tighter control if you ask +10degrees pitch the crazyflie accelerates and if you ask 0 it just stop accelerating. It will then continue at nearly constant speed. This is the “correct” behavior. This also means that the Crazyflie now reacts much more precisely and quickly to joystick controls.

We have tried to make a short video to show the new performance. Though the attitude control is really hard to show. We installed a test pilot on our Crazyflie that shows how much the new parameters helps in overall stability (I have tried to steer with old parameters as hard as I was steering with the new one). We also show more stability in pretty windy condition.

These new parameter have been pushed protected by an experimental flag. After more testing the official firmware will have much better flight performance out of the box :-).