Happy holidays to all our users, community members and friends! We are happy to announce our 2019 Christmas video which we have made in collaboration with Ben Kuper! It is starring 7 Crazyflies, the lighthouse positioning system, our office Christmas tree and a whole lot of holiday spirit, so go ahead and take a look!
Here are some words from Ben how it was to work on this year’s Christmas video at our office:
Coming to Bitcraze’s HQ and working with them has been once more a wonderful experience, technically and humanly ! The main goal of this session was to test and implement the new lighthouse tracking system in the tool suite I’m creating, and it was an amazing surprise to witness for real the uncanny stability of the drones when they’re on lighthouse tracking !
Of course, my first reaction was to push the limit and see what can be done with this new power, this is why I created this choreography : to see what can be done in a limited amount of time (1 and a half day to create the full choreography, the official video shows the first part only), and trying to go at the limit of the current possibilities. As the team was working on occlusion recovery, we decided to have the drone fly around the tree as a fun test, and it works !
In the new year we will have a followup blog-post going into detail on how exactly we made this video. Until then, happy holidays and have an awesome new year!
For the last four years of doing my PhD at the TU Delft and the MAVlab, we were determined to figure out how to make a swarm/group of tiny quadcopters fly through and explore an unknown indoor environment. This was not easy, as many of the sub-challenges that needed to be solved first. However, we are happy to say that we were able to show a proof-of-concept in the latest Science Robotics issue! Here you can see the press release from the TU Delft for general information about the project.
Since we used the Crazyflie 2.0 to achieve this result, this blog-post we wanted to mostly highlight the technical side of the research, of the achievements and the challenges we had to face. Moreover, we will also explain the updated code which uses the new features of the Crazyflie Firmware as explained in the previous blogpost.
A swarm of drones exploring the environment, avoiding obstacles and each other. (Guus Schoonewille, TU Delft)
Hardware
In the paper, we presented a technique called Swarm Gradient Bug Algorithm (SGBA), which borrows (as the name suggests) navigational elements from the path planning technique called ‘Bug Algorithms’ (see this paper for an overview). The basic principle is that SGBA is a state-machine with several simple behavior presets such as ‘going to the goal’, ‘wall-following’ and ‘avoiding other Crazyflies’. Here in the bottom you can see all the modules were used. For the main experiments (on the left), the Crazyflie 2.0’s were equipped with the Multiranger and the Flowdeck (here we used the Flow deck v1). On the right you see the Crazyflies used for the application experiment, were we made an custom Multiranger deck (with four VL53L0x‘s) and a Hubsan Camera module. For both we used the Turnigy nanotech 300 mAh (1S 45-90C) LiPo battery, to increase the flight time to 7.5 min.
With this, we were able to have 6 Crazyflies explore an empty office floor in the faculty building of Aerospace engineering. They started out in the middle of the test environment and flew all in different preferred directions which they upheld by their internal estimated yaw angle. With the multi-rangers, they managed to detect walls in their, and followed its border until the way was clear again to follow their preferred direction. Based on their local odometry measurements with the flowdeck, the Crazyflies detected if they were flying in a loop, in order to get out of rooms or other situations.
A little before half way of their battery life, they would try to get back to their initial position, which they did by measuring the Received Signal Strength Intensity of the Crazyradio PA home beacon, which was located at their initial starting position. During wall-following, they measured the gradient of the RSSI, to determine in which directions it increases or decreases, to estimate the angle back the goal.
While they were navigating, they were also communicating with each-other by means of broadcasting messages. Based on those measurements of RSSI, they could sense other Crazyflies approaching, which they first of all used for collision avoidance (by letting the low priority CFs move out of the way of the high priority CFs). Second of all, during the initial exploration phase, they communicated their preferred direction as well, so that one of them can change its exploration behavior to not conflict with the other. This way, we tried to maximize the explored area by the Crazyflies.
One of those experiments with 6 Crazyflies can be seen in this video for better understanding:
We also showed an application experiment where 4 crazyflies with the camera modules searched for 2 dummies in the same environment.
Challenges
In order to get the results presented above, there were many challenges to overcome during the development phase. Here is a list that explains a couple of the elements that needed to work flawlessly:
Single CF robustness: We used the Flowdeck v1, for the ‘deadlock’ detection and the basic velocity control, which was challenging in the testing environment because of low lighting conditions and texture. Therefore the Crazyflies were flying at 0.5 meters in order to ensure robustness. The wall-following was performed solely using the Multiranger. This was tested out in many situations and was able to handle a lot of type of obstacles without any problem. However the limited FOV of the laser range finder can not detect all types of obstacles, for instance thin ones or irregular ones such as plants. Luckily these were not encountered in the environment the Crazyflies flew in, but to increase robustness, we will need to consider adding a camera to the navigational drive as well.
Communication base-station. SGBA by essence only needs one base-station Crazyradio PA, since all the behavior is completely on board. However, in order to show results in the paper, it was necessary for the CF to communicate information back, like odometry, state and such. As this was a two way communication (CFs needed RSSI to get back) each Crazyflie needed 1 base-station. Also, they all needed to be on different channels to avoid package collisions and RSSI accumulation.
Communication Peer to Peer. At development time, P2P didn’t exist yet, so we had to implement broadcast communication between the Crazyflies. Since the previous pointer required them to listen on different channels, the NRF had to be configured to send separate broadcast messages on all those channels as well. In order to time this properly, the home beacon had to sync the Crazyflies accordingly by sending out a timer. Even so, the avoidance maneuvers were done very conservatively to try to prevent inter-drone collisions.
Many of the issues, especially the communication challenges, will be solved with the updated code implementation as explained in the next section.
Updated code
The firmware that the Crazyflies used to fly in the experiments showed in the paper, can all be found in this public repository. However, the code is based quite an old version the current Crazyflie firmware, as it was forked almost a year ago. The implementation of the SGBA state machine and the P2P broadcasting were not generic enough to integrate this back to the development cycle, therefore the current code is only suitable for the old Crazyflie 2.0.
Therefore, we developed two major changes in the latest firmware which will make it much easier for me (and other ideas as well we hope!) to implement SGBA and the P2P communication in a way that should be compatible with any version of the firmware (and hardware) from here and on. We implemented SGBA as an app-layer and also handled all the broadcast messaging directly from this layer as well. Please check out this Github repository with this new app layer implementation of SGBA.
The Crazyflie Bolt and the Crazyflie 2.1 with the lighthouse deck are coming to Madrid!
Only one week away until the start of the big Bitcraze Conference frenzy, with the first stop… Madrid! We will visit the Micro Air Vehicle Competition and Conference, which is a robotics event that is more specialized in (as the name implies) MAVs! So it should be right up our alley. This is the first time that we attend as Bitcraze, although the writer of this blog post has experienced fun times at the conference and the competition as a participant with her previous lab, the MAVlab.
The IMAV has been around for almost 12 years, starting in Toulouse, France in 2007. Although it initially mostly was held in various places in Europe, in 2016 into a more worldwide phenomenon by making it’s tribute in Beijing, China and Melbourne, Australia in 2018. It hosts a conference to which researchers can send their work in anything related to MAVs, from autonomous navigation, state estimation and design.
IMAV is mostly know for hosting big indoor and outdoor competitions for MAVs. The outdoor competitions can range from survey tasks to finding a hidden person or object. This year the focus will be on the delivery of packages from one place to another. The judges will look at how many packages that can be safely delivered and if the drone is able to detect certain objects in the outdoor environment. The indoor competition is oriented around the application of MAVs in a warehouse. They should be able to take off autonomously, monitor boxes in shelves and make an innovatory, and pickup packages to release them in their designated location. 40 teams of 28 universities will show their awesome implementation in these difficult tasks.
We will have a booth at the main company fair at the conference and indoor competition, and will also be present at the outdoor competition day as well. We will bring the lighthouse positioning system and show the awesome swarming demo we developed. Also we want to bring the new Crazyflie Bolt with us, which we are sure of that the regular IMAV crew will love. If you are at the IMAV between the 30th of September to the 4th of October, come by and say hello!
We have a busy schedule in the fall, since we are planning to travel all around the world for all kinds of awesome conferences and symposia. Here is a quick overview of where we are planning to go in October and November.
IMAV Madrid 1/10-4/10
We will attend the IMAV 2019, and this time it is in Madrid (Spain) from the 1th to the 4th of October. This is a conference for anything related to micro-aerial vehicles and also includes an awesome indoor and outdoor competition. Arnaud and Kimberly will be present at both the indoor and outdoor fair, where we will show some demos with the lighthouse system and show off our new Crazyflie Bolt!
In collaboration with our partner CLRobur, we will have a symposium in Seoul (Korea) on the 14th and 15th of October. Kristoffer will explain the attendees all about positioning systems, and show off the LPS and our new lighthouse deck.
Sign up here or send an email to clrobur@naver.com
IROS Macau 4/11-8/11
Last but not least, we will be there at IROS 2019 as well! This is one of the flagship robotics conferences of IEEE. In Macau (China) from the 4th till the 8th of November, Marcus and Tobias will show some awesome demos with the lighthouse system and hopefully we will present the new AI deck!
A lot of you are using our forum on a regular basis. From our point of view, we prefer giving support and guidance on our forum instead of by email, since solutions we provide to our users can be found by others as well. However, we are experiencing some spam-related issues with the forum!
Somewhere last week, our forum started getting some weird posts, including some links to websites that are…. not exactly Bitcraze or Crazyflie related… We didn’t think about it too much, so we cleaned the forum, deleted the users responsible and moved on. But the very next day more spam post appeared, and it was getting so bad that we changed our sign-up from the regular security question to Captcha. Unfortunately, spambots are way too smart these days, so that didn’t work either… By the end of the weekend we had to remove over an hundred spam accounts and 500 spam posts!
The forum is experiencing a major spam attack at the moment and the usual security measures are not helping. Since yesterday, we enabled manual activation of new users (meaning that we physically need to approve each account), since currently this is the only way to catch the dodgy new accounts (we already caught over 100 in one day alone !!). This week we will look into other measures and plugins to better secure our forum, so we don’t have to manually go through all the newly registered users to see if they are not spam bots. We heard about Cleantalk by one of our users, so we probably will give that a go!
However, please be contact us if the following occurred or is occurring to you in our spam removing frenzy:
If we accidentally removed a post of you
If we removed or banned your account
If we are not activating your new account
Also make our lives a bit easier this week, and send us an email straight away if you have just have made a new account on the forum. Send an email to: contact@bitcraze.io with your username and a sentence about why you are using the Crazyflie (so we know that you are real).
This is only a temporary solution, so hopefully at the end of this week or the next we will not need to worry about this anymore :).
Our usual blog posts usually consists of the awesome new products and demos that we make here at Bitcraze, but now we will talk about… documentation! Alright alright, it is maybe not the most thrilling topic, however you should be excited about it! Good documentation about the Crazyflie and its tools will not only enable you to recreate the demos and the work of others, but also to implement your own ideas and to contribute to our open-source firmware.
In the years that Bitcraze has been around, there has been quite the build-up of information, which can be either found on the main website, the wiki, the github repositories, and in bits & pieces on the forum. Although we try to provide all the information necessary for getting started with development, it is currently quite a clutter. If we at Bitcraze already have difficulty of finding and maintaining all the documentation, we can only imagine how difficult it would be for a starting developer. We therefore would like to improve the flow of information dramatically!
Here are some ideas of what we would like to do with the documentation:
Moving product information to the shop.
LED ring expansion deck in the main website, shop, and wiki.
Currently there are three different locations where you can find information about physical Crazyflie, localization systems or expansion decks, which is the main website, the online store and the wiki. We see that a lot of electronic and hardware shops usually put all the details of the product directly on the product page of their shops. We aim to do that as well, since there will only be one page for users to go to for schematics, specifications, instructions and more, and for us it will be also easier to maintain and update any product information
Moving Software Info to GitHub
There is a lot of bits and pieces of information to handle the firmware on the Crazyflie and all the tools in the tutorials on our main website, wiki and Github repository. This again makes a lot of duplicate information, which is difficult for us to maintain and therefore gets easily outdated. We could put all the information on the wiki, but what if somebody changes something in the code which requires a change in the procedure as well?
Create a /doc folder on the repositories to better structure all the information
Add more Doxygen comments to all the function in the the codes and automatically generate documentation for this.
Restructuring the Wiki Content
After moving all the hardware- related content to the shop, and moving all the firmwar- related info to the Github repositories, we will need to think about what we want to do with the Wiki! You would think that there is nothing left to put on the wiki anymore after the replacement of the earlier documentation, but we beg to differ! For instance, there is so many Github repositories that there is a really a need for an overview. The wiki can educate developers on which tools we have an how to properly use them. Of course, we already have the getting started tutorials, but we want to also provide a more in-depth explanation of the overall structure and how the different repositories would need tho work together, like this .
This does mean that we would need to restructure the wiki entirely and only focusing on topics like:
System Architecture Crazyflie
Communication protocol between STM and the NRF
Communication protocol between the Python library and the Client
Overview Github-repositories
Projects and hacks
etc etc
What do you think?!
Of course we can change all we want in the documentation, but you guys are the ones who actually use it! We are very curious of what what you think of the plans and give us more tips or suggestions on how to improve the overall documentation experience. Please leave a message below or express your opinion on this forum thread.
Summer is here and temperatures are rising. Since many of us will be on holidays, we will focus this quarter on a special summer clean up! See here what we are working on:
Fixing issues: This time we are aiming to close many of the issue tickets in our Github repositories, so that after the summer everything will run much more smoothly (we hope!). Definitely our test rig will come in very hand to sniff out more issues in terms of radio communication as well. You can help as well! Everybody who is using and developing on with the STM-firmware,NRF-firmware or python library, or anything else and is noticing issues, please make a ticket in that same Github repository (if you are familiar with the code) or post about it on our forum (if you do not know exactly what is going on). Together we can make the code better.
Lighthouse calibration: In March we released our lighthouse deck for positioning with the HTC Vive base stations. We did feel that the setup process could be improved further, since currently, the Crazyflies’ firmware must contain hardcoded information of the Steam VR’s base station position. We will try to apply the factory calibration direct from the Base stations itself. This will enable us to do 2 additional things: (1) The Crazyflie with the LH deck itself could be used to setup the Lighthouse system, so that SteamVR would not be necessary anymore. (2) Only 1 base station is needed for positioning instead of 2, which will improve the robustness in case of loss of visual-line-of-sight of one base station.
Documentation: We try to provide all the possible information for everybody to be able do anything they want with their Crazyflie. But with high flexibility comes great responsibility…. for proper documentation! We are planning to restructure all of our media outlets and try to improve the flow and level of detail for our users. We hope to make it easier for beginning developers to get started and more advanced developers to gain better understanding of the system in order to implement their own awesome ideas. So our very first step is to restructure and clean up the Bitcraze wiki and see where we can add more content.
Products: We have a lot of products coming out in the 2nd half of the year
AI Deck: We are working hard to get the AI deck all ready for production and we are estimating that they will be available for early access in late autumn. Keep a look out on our forum for regular updates on the progress!
Lighthouse breakout board: We made our first working prototype of the lighthouse breakout board, which should make it easier for the lighthouse positioning system to also work on other platforms than the Crazyflie.
Active Marker Deck: We are very much on on track with the Qualisys active marker deck! It should be available in the Autumn.
Crazyflie Bolt: This has been send off to production for the early access version, which should be available in the Autumn!
Hi, very nice to meet you all! My name is Kimberly McGuire and I would like to introduce myself as the newest member of the Bitcraze team. Although I probably have never written anything bigger than a paragraph about myself before, but I will try my best to get you to know me a little better!
The first thing you should know about me is that I’m Dutch. I grew up in the Netherlands, which is a small little country that has fought for eternity against the sea and still managed to exist. If you do visit and would appreciate some impressive pieces of Civil Engineering, don’t linger around in Amsterdam but visit the “Delta werken” in the province of Zeeland or the ‘Afsluitdijk” in the north. But if you don’t like to take your chances near our oceans, ‘Utrecht’, ‘Groningen’ and ‘Maastricht are really nice to visit too! Probably my last name already gave it away, but I’m also half-American and I visit California almost once a year.
So, let’s talk about hobbies! I have played tennis for almost all my life (started when I was just 6 years old), and I’ve played competitively in tournaments and team-based competitions. You can also find me skiing on some mountains at least once per year. In general, I really love visiting other countries and to experience the culture and, most importantly, the food. During my studies I’ve managed to go on extended stays abroad: I’ve spent a half a year in Santa Barbara, 3 months in Liverpool, a half a year in Tokyo. Talking about the latter: I’m a huge fan of pretty much everything related to Japan. All their food, Ghibli studios and other Japanese productions, the culture and people, and I do admit that I’m quite the karaoke addict. Moreover, I love going to the movies, playing videogames, and enjoying Dutch coziness, a.k.a. “gezelligheid”, with friends.
To show in a slice of my educational background: for my Bachelor studies at the Delft University of Technology, I started out at Industrial Design Engineering. Here I learned everything there is to know about product development, from analyzing market-trends, creating concepts to finally to the full production process. For my Masters I was leaning more towards the technical side. After a bridging course to Mechanical engineering I went to do an M.Sc. in BioMecanical design with a specialization in Bio-Robotics (currently known cognitive robotics). I ended developing a cerebellum-based stabilization system for a binocular robotic head (google “jaguar chicken commercial”:) ). After this, I came across a project at the MAVlab where I was allowed to work with tiny MAVs called pocket-drones, and the first thing I thought was ‘awesome!!’, however, that was before I realized that working with tiny MAVs was not a piece of cake. I’m glad that the inner-geek in me kept me excited for 4 years straight, which is a crucial element or any PhD I believe, or any job!
So now a new chapter will start for me in Sweden. I hope that I will append to Bitcraze’s vision and I’m quite sure that they will teach me how to become a better hardware and software developer. I’m excited to start working with Arnaud, Marcus, Kristoffer and Tobias and develop more things that will make any’s inner-geek jump a little from excitement. At the moment of writing, we will be on ICRA in Montreal, Canada, so jump by booth 101 to say hi!
Last week we blogged about the early release version of the lighthouse deck and showed a nice push-around demo of the Crazyflies using the Vive controller. Now we wanted to push the system even further, by making a Lighthouse Painting!
We started by adding a LED-ring deck on the bottom of the CrazyFlie 2.1 with the lighthouse deck attached to the top. We were able to access the input of the track pad of the Vive controller and link it to a specific color / hue value. The LED ring can display any color possible in the RGB range, so in theory, you could paint in whatever color you like. For now, the brightness was fixed, but this could be easily added to the demo script as well.
To capture the light trace, we needed to make a long-exposure image, therefore, the flight arena need to stay completely dark. Luckily, this was easy to do for us since we do not have any windows in our new testing arena. Our camera is the Canon D5600 with a manually controlled shutter time setting selected (press to open the shutter and press again to close the shutter). The aperture setting was set at F-22. Nevertheless, this is very depended on the environment, so we had to do some trial-and-error in order to get this parameter right.
Aperture too wide… perfect!
Once we had the set-up finished, we made several long exposure photo paintings with one person controlling the camera and another painting the picture into thin air. Of course, the artist would need to imagine its creation, as we were not able to see the result until after the picture was taken. Also, big gestures were required in order to complete the painting, as the Crazyflie’s and the Vive controller’s movements were synced 1:1, so adding some multiplication factor would come in handy. Nonetheless, the results were amazing.
Some nice examples of a single crazyflie flying based on the Vive’s position, changing color based on the trackpad
We took it even further, by making the Crazyflie fly a predefined trajectory and planned color scheme without the Vive controller. First, it flew three concentric circles in green, red and blue with the high level commander with the PID controller setting. But, the circles would probably be closed-off more properly with the Mellinger controller setting. We also were able to reproduce the Bitcraze logo in the same fashion. In both long-exposure photos, it still possible to see the Crazyflie, as it is still traceable due to its routine LED functionality, so you can easily observe where it took off, and where it flew in between shapes.
The Crazyflie flying a predefined trajectory in several shapes
The demo python scripts of the above flights can be found here:
An we also took a video of the Bitcraze logo being drawn. The mobile phone camera had some problems focusing in the dark, but it gives a good idea of how things works:
