Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), be they quadcopters or other type of flyer, will become more "intelligent" as themselves or by forming swarms, as this TED Talk by Vijay Kumar at U. Penn shows.

My interest in drones lies not in flying them myself live, because I'm a lousy pilot and don't play games much anyway, but in making them follow a predetermined route and return back to the starting point – for example, surveying an object or estate, or even carrying cargo between waypoints. The gorgeous aerial shots you get with many drones these days are great, of course, but I'll let others play the director, and instead concentrate on the programming.

I recently got a Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 Elite Edition, mostly because it was the cheapest quadcopter that has an SDK, allowing you to create your own applications on top of it, or extend and customise some sample applications. (AR.Drone 2.0 SDK)

I did some web searches on the programmability of the AR.Drone, and it seems that the biggest craze has faded a little bit. Many of the libraries for Python and Node.js are not seeing as active development as I would have thought, and groups like NodeCopter are not too active either.

It also seems that some active members have moved on to do greater things, like Fleye, a personal flying robot – the result of work by Laurent Eschenauer and Dimitri Arendt:

The Fleye Kickstarter campaign is still ongoing, with delivery scheduled for September 2016.

Ecshenauer is the author of the Node.js library ardrone-autonomy, which itself is based on node-ar-drone by Felix Geisendörfer.

There is also the python-ardrone library for Python, which I would prefer over Node.js.

I have tested both node-ar-drone and python-ardrone quickly with the AR.Drone 2.0, and it is an exhilarating experience to see your quadcopter come to life and rise up to hover, just by entering a few commands in the Node or Python REPL. (Just make sure you can quickly call the land() function, especially if you are experimenting indoors.)

There are also some Clojure libraries for controlling the AR.Drone, such as clj-drone and turboshrimp, but I'm not sure if I would want to add JVM to the mix.

My inspiration for programming drones actually got sparked by the O'Reilly Programming Newsletter, which featured a recent article by Greg on The Yhat Blog titled "Building a (semi) Autonomous Drone with Python". It had a lot of tips about how to start with this kind of activity, and extending it to involve computer vision using OpenCV.

I intend to develop some applications that fly the AR.Drone automatically along the perimeter of a large object, such as a house, or along some predetermined line, like the side of a field. I hope to document some of the results in this blog.

If you're interested in programming semi-autonomous drones, drop me a line with any ideas, tips, questions, or collaborations.