Table of Contents

This page has deprecated and will be archived. Please go to https://www.bitcraze.io/.

This page contains information about projects, applications and scripts for automatically piloting the Crazyflie using cameras from the host. The parts needed for controlling is split up in numerous scripts connected together using ZMQ.

Note Currently this is all pretty hackish. See the setup page for a step-by-step setup guide, hopefully it is pretty straightforward to setup.

Architecture

In order to be able to easily work with different steps of the piloting (like detection and control) the parts are connected together using ZMQ. This gives the benefit of easily stopping, changing and restarting parts of the chain without having to restart everything.

Currently there's 5 parts:

  • Image processing: Find X, Y, Z and rotation
  • Control: Control loops
  • Set-points: UI for setting set-points
  • Client: Connection to client for sending data
  • Visualization: Debugging using grapghs

Parts

Image processing

The first step to controlling the Crazyflie is to detect its position and angle. For this a camera can be used, currently we are using the IR/depth sensor on the Kinect 2 together with markers. The output of this step is the X/Y/Z coordinates in meters as well as the angle in degrees and weather or not the Crazyflie is detected.

Fields in ZMQ message:

Field Type Unit
pos list of floats (x, y, z) Meters
angle float Degrees
detect boolean N/A

Example of message 

{
  "pos": [0.1, -0.1, 1.0],
  "angle": 35.2,
  "detect": true
}

Control

Once the position and rotation of the Crazyflie is know the control is used to correct the positional and rotational error from the set-point. Currently the Z axis has no position control, only velocity control (set to 0 m/s by default). By default the set-points are (x, y) = (0, 0), angle = 0 and velocity. The output of the control is the roll/pitch/yaw/thrust set-points for the Crazyflie.

Fields in ZMQ message:

Field Type Unit
ctrl Dictionary N/A

The ctrl dictionary should contain:

Field Type Unit
roll float Degrees
pitch float Degrees
yaw float Degrees/s
thrust float PWM

Example of message 

{
  "ctrl": {
    "roll": 0.1,
    "pitch": 0.1,
    "yaw": 0.0,
    "thrust": 0.0
  }
}

Set-points

In order to do something more interesting than just hovering it's possible to send set-points to the control.

Fields in ZMQ message:

Field Type Unit
set-points Dictionary

The set-points dictionary should contain:

Field Type Unit
roll float Meters
pitch float Meters
yaw float Degrees
velocity float m/s

Example of message 

{
  "set-points": {
    "roll": 0.5,
    "pitch": -0.5,
    "yaw": 10.5,
    "velocity": 0.1
  }
}

Client

When the corrections have been calculated it's time to send them to the Crazyflie. This is done using the ZMQ input in the client. This will allow to switch between manual/automatic control while also getting feedback from the Crazyflie.

Visualization

In order to debug the control algorithms there's a basic graphing tool available.

Fields in ZMQ message:

Field Type Unit
name string Name of controller for data
data dictionary

The data dictionary should contain:

Field Type Comment
P float P contribution to PID
I float I contribution to PID
D float D contribution to PID
E float Error
SP float The set-point
OUT float The output of the PID (P, I, D summed)

Example of message 

{
  "name": "Roll",
  "data": {
    "P": 0.1,
    "I": 0.2,
    "D": 0.3,
    "E": 0.1,
    "SP": 0.4,
    "OUT": 0.6
  }
}