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Hardware requirements

You'll need following to follow this guide

  • Based-station (Laptop)
  • One or more Parrot’s AR Drone 2.0
  • Wifi-router

Software requirements

You'll need following to follow this guide

  • This has been tested on Mac OS Sierra & Ubuntu 14.04, should work fine on Windows too
  • nodejs v8.1.0 https://nodejs.org/en/
  • npm v5.0.3 (npm is distributed with Node.js- which means that when you download Node.js, you automatically get npm installed on your computer.)

Libraries attribution

Getting started

Before getting started, it’s important to know the default behaviour of Parrot’s AR Drone 2.0. It works by creating an open ad-hoc network which you can connect to using your smartphone. FreeFlight app uses this ad-hoc network to communicate with the drone. AR Drone runs stripped down variant of Linux called BusyBox which can allow us to telnet into the drone, tweak with configuration scripts and even allow for internet connectivity on the drone.

We'll configure each drone to connect to specific WPA2 protected wifi network instead of creating open ad-hoc network. To be able to do this, we'll first need to telnet into the drone, install wpa_supplicant and then run the script to connect to specified network. Necessary code for all of this is in network_setup folder (Thanks to https://github.com/daraosn/ardrone-wpa2).

Configure wifi network

Configure your wireless router to create an WPA2 protected wifi network, in my case it's named squadrones. Router should be configured to have an IP address of 192.168.1.1 on subnet 255.255.255.0. Configure the router's DHCP server to give clients IP addresses starting from 192.168.1.100, we will reserve small pool for drones (192.168.1.10-99).

Clone repository

git clone https://github.com/sarmadsaleem/squadrones.git

Configure each drone

  • Turn on AR Drone 2.0 and connect your laptop to its wifi network (e.g. ardrone2_042129)
  • Install wpa_supplicant and connection script on your drone (to be done once for each drone).
cd network_setup
script/install
  • Connect drone to wifi network squadrones. Make sure to use unique ip address for each drone. (to be done everytime you want your drone to connect to specified wifi network)
# script/connect "<essid>" -p "<password>" -a <ip-address-to-be-alloted> -d <droneip>
script/connect "squadrones" -p "password" -a 192.168.1.10 -d 192.168.1.1
  • Connect your laptop to squadrones wifi network and verify if the drone is connected
ping 192.168.1.10

Pull in dependencies, start the server and enjoy simple swarm interface

Navigate to root of repo and run following commands

npm install
node server.js

Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser

Future plans

  • Preset formations of drones instead of same commands being broadcasted to all of them
  • Toggle to control drones individually or collectively
  • Integrate PID Controller and tag detections to follow & land
  • Preset animations and tricks