Crippled Drone

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  Existing Drone from another Project

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  Existing Drone from another Project

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  Newly Modified Drone with Custom 3D printed Part to house Raspberry Pi and Flight Controller

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  Indoor Test Flight

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  Outdoor Test Flight

Inspiration

In Singapore, drone flying is strictly regulated. For example, no flying of drones near airfields, military complex, etc. Therefore, I have put a hard ceiling on how high the drone can fly.

What it does

Nothing fancy, when the drone flies above 1.7 meters (above human height), the program will know and force the drone to decent until it reaches a 'legal' height of 1.5 meters

How I built it

I connect my existing drone and its flight controller (pixhawk) to a Raspberry Pi. Install dronekit to establish a communication link between Raspberry Pi and pixhawk. After which, using a function from dronekit to enable automatic take-off and hand-over the control to users.

Users can fly the drone as normal as long as the height is less than 1.7 meters, the height detection is done using a Lidar install on the drone frame. Once the Lidar detects the drone fly above 1.7 meters, it will command the drone to decent to 1.5 meters.

Challenges I ran into

Connecting Raspberry Pi to Pixhawk (flight controller) as there are many dependencies for dronekit library

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

It works and my drone can never fly above my height

What I learned

How to control a drone using Raspberry Pi and issuing different commands to the drone from Raspberry Pi

What's next for crippled drone

I have a D435 from another project of mine and I play to integrate D435 into the drone for obstacle detection so that it will be safe to fly indoors. There are open-source libraries that integrates D435 into Pixhawk for obstacle detection and avoidance

Built With

• python