The Drone Project

Finding and mapping a single fire by an initial grid search to discover the smoke plume, gradient tracking to find the source, and subsequent area mapping.

Map of a fire and smoke plume on a windy beach, you can see where the drones got a little distracted by lots of car exhaust from the parking lot in the upper left.

Watching multiple simulated drones with APM planner.

Project Notes

• Things ending in *mission.py are missions meant to be run on the drone.
• All the tests are currently in src/test.py
• simulator.py is the most up-to-date way to run multiple instances of the drone in the SITL (software-in-the-loop) simulator.
• Use APM Planner to connect to the simulated drone to get some visual output about what it's doing. For simulated drone instance N, each drone instance listens on port 5760 + 10*N for connections from a ground control station (such as APM Planner).

Provided in this repo:

• Scripts to launch dronekit-sitl sessions. simulator.py allows for arbitrary numbers of drones

Installing Non-Python Dependencies

The only thing you should need is iperf, which is needed for WiFi bandwidth measurements. Use your system's package manager. e.g.

sudo apt-get install iperf
brew install iperf 
...etc...

Installing Python Dependencies

For a host machine (not a drone):

pip install -r requirements_host.txt

This will install extra packages needed to run the simulator.

For the drone:

pip install -r requirements_drone.txt

Running the tests

cd src
nosetests -v test.py 

One of the tests starts a simulator instance and waits for it to explore waypoints, so it may take a while. Run it with the -s option to get more output.