The future of Nodecopter

Presented at LXJS

Transcript

1. Let’s talk about Nodecopter
   

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2. Andrew Nesbitt @teabass
   Hi, I’m Andrew.
   A freelance software developer from the UK
   

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3. Bertie @BertramRabbit
   This is my rabbit Bertie
   

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4. Rabbits understand streams
   

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5. I’m the steward of the London Node.js User Group, one of the biggest Node meetups in Europe.
   We had our 2nd Birthday last week
   

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6. I’m also one of the organisers of the Great British Node Conference.
   It’s a community driven, not-for-profit conference in London and it’s only 5 days away!
   

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7. Core Team
   And just last week I was added to the core team
   

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8. Core Team
   And just last week I was added to the core team
   

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9. Previously
   Previously, at LXJS, Felix introduced the ar-drone library for controlling quadcopters programatically. This then became a Hack
   event called Nodecopter.
   

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10. There have been 20 official events across the globe, and there are at least 4 more confirmed, including one on this friday.
    You could say it’s really taking off!
    

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11. There have been 20 official events across the globe, and there are at least 4 more confirmed, including one on this friday.
    You could say it’s really taking off!
    

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12. There have been 20 official events across the globe, and there are at least 4 more confirmed, including one on this friday.
    You could say it’s really taking off!
    

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13. For the past 7 months, my life has revolved around these flying robots.
    

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14. Thanks to the London Node group I was able to put together a fleet of sponsored AR Drones
    

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15. So I could put on Nodecopter events across the UK.
    Like this one in Bath.
    

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16. And this one in London
    

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17. Helping over 400 developers to begin programming flying robots, across 10 different events.
    

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18. and spending many hours repairing the envitible breakages along the way.
    

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19. BURFIELD
    I’d just like to take a minute to thank the numerous sponsors for their ongoing support of the events that I’ve been involved in.
    They couldn’t have been possible without them.
    

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20. Nodecopter.pt
    Right here in Lisbon! There may still be tickets, check out nodecopter.pt for details.
    

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21. Hacks
    I wanted to share a few of my favourite hacks
    

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22. QR CodeR
    Encoding commands into QR code which are shown to the drone which detects and reads it then executes the command.
    This is possibly the only valid use of a QR code I’ve ever seen.
    

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23. Next up is my glamerous assistant Julian controlling a drone through the medium of interpretive dance.
    

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24. Continuing the theme of full body control, here I am controlling a drone using a Microsoft Kinect.
    The code for all of these demos is up on Github and listed on Nodecopter.com
    

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25. QAAS
    What we’ve seen come out of Nodecopter is something I like to call QaaS
    or Quadcopters as a service.
    

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26. Quadcopters
    as a
    Service
    The beauty of a high level api like Nodecopter is that it is almost as easy to integrate robots into a system as any other web
    service.
    And when there is such little overhead, more ambitious projects are more likely to be undertaken.
    Nodecopter Travis is a great example.
    

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27. Why do it?
    I often get asked why do I do so many Nodecopter events?
    

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28. Programmatic Flying Robots
    Firstly: Programmatic Flying Robots
    

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29. Dont you get
    bored?
    But don’t you get bored of them after a while?
    

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30. Programmatic Flying Robots!!
    HELLO PROGRAMMATIC FLYING ROBOTS!!!
    You’ve got some serious first world problems if you get bored of you’re own personal airbourne robotic servant!
    

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31. BEng Robotics &
    Automated Systems
    University of PLymouth
    To actually answer the question I need to go back a few years to my university degree, Robotics and Automated systems at
    Plymouth
    I based my decision to do this course almost completely on one TV show
    

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32. Robot wars: As a nerdy teenager this was my dream, to build remote control fighting robots and watch them smash the life out of
    each other.
    A degree in robots seemed like the perfect way to make this happen.
    It wasn’t quite what I was expecting
    

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33. How cool was that!
    

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34. Advanced Mathematics
    Mechanical Engineering
    Digital Electronics Analogue Electronics
    Computer Science
    Control Theory
    neural networking microprocessor Design
    Playing with Robots
    Learning Robotics
    This is what my course actually involved learning about.
    

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35. Advanced Mathematics
    Observing Robots behind glass
    Learning Robotics
    Advanced Mathematics
    Advanced Mathematics
    Advanced Mathematics
    Advanced Mathematics
    Advanced Mathematics
    Advanced Mathematics
    Advanced Mathematics
    Which is actually all just advanced maths and at the end of the three years you get to watch some industrial robots move a block
    around behind a screen.
    Nodecopter flips that learning process on it’s head
    

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36. Advanced Mathematics
    Mechanical
    Engineering
    Digital & Analogue
    Electronics
    Computer Science Control Theory
    neural networks
    microprocessor
    Design
    Playing with Robots
    Learning Nodecopter
    Computer Vision
    You start by getting your hands dirty, then when you run into huddles that stop something from working right, you need learn
    about all these things to improve.
    Nothing made that process more clear to me than when I took the fleet to CoderDojo
    

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37. CoderDojo
    CoderDojo is a global collection of events that provide free and open learning to young people, especially in programming and
    technology.
    We had about 25 kids aged between 11 and 15 working with their parents to hack on the drones.
    

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38. With just enough JavaScript to be danerous, the kids picked up the basics faster than I ever expected,
    

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39. Playing around with Virtual drones in Voxel to get the hang of them, then unleased on the real things, they caused havoc!
    

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40. This was incredibly inspiring for me, to see future generations of programmers taking to robotics like a duck to water, making
    dance routines and controllers out of tin foil.
    

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41. kids + robots =
    This is how robotics should be taught, hands on and engaging.
    Learning maths should be a side effect of making cool things not dry and boring. And incase it isn’t completely obvious to you...
    

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42. The future is
    made of robots
    The future is made of robots! The rate of change of technological progression is accelerating.
    Instead of seeing robots as magic mechanical boxes created by a corperation, they should be learning how to tame robots.
    It’s our responsibility to help them use robots for the good of humanity, rather than being slaves to them.
    

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43. What is next?
    So what’s next for Nodecopter, how can we take it up a level?
    

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44. NodeCopter
    Flight school
    I’d love to use the power of Nodecopter to help make a dent in the world
    Work with kids coding initatives like Code club and CoderDojo to get kids particiapting in robotics from a young age and maybe
    even using it as a platform to get robotics as part of school ciriculums.
    

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45. Drone Racing
    I’d also really like to put on a drone racing event. I’m a big motor racing fan, and I’ll love to add a competitive element to a
    nodecopter event
    

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46. I see this working a lot like the darpa challenge, where teams build automous cars to drive a course with no human interaction.
    Imagine a course that you had to fly a nodecopter through completely autonomously.
    

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47. One more thing
    I wasn’t going to come all this way and not show something cool.
    

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48. Nodecopter GPS
    Parrot recently brought out a GPS addon for the AR Drone, allowing for accurate positional feedback when outdoors.
    Although the new API is undocumented, I was able to reverse engineer it to get back lat/lon from the drone using the regular
    library.
    

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49. npm install ar-drone@0.2.1
    Oh yeah, this version doesn’t exist yet, lets ship it now!
    

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51. ar-drone-gps
    So for the past few weeks I’ve been building this control center on top of the GPS api, leaflet.js for the map and node-
    dronestream for video.
    

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52. Waypoint Route
    Follow Mode
    Return Home
    Video Stream
    Manual Gamepad Control
    Features
    Waypoint will fly to each pin on a map in turn, Follow mode tries to stay close to your mobile device, return home goes back to
    where it took off from and manual control is for taking over when things get crazy
    

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53. Mobile UI
    Photo button
    Integrate ARDrone-Autonomy
    Upload waypoints directly to drone
    Would be Nice
    It would be nice to have these features too
    

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54. github.com/andrew/ar-drone-gps
    And It’s on github!
    

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55. Thank You andrew@nodecopter.com
    github.com/andrew
    @teabass
    

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