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.

• 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.

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:

Shrimpdroid is an Android app that uses turboshrimp to let you fly a drone with your phone.

$ lein test

• 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.

Copyright 2014, 2015 John Wiseman [email protected]

Distributed under the MIT License.