The Joy of Flying AR Drones with Clojure

It's not clojure, but this is fun: https://github.com/andrew/quadcopter-presentation

  Quadcopter Presentation
  An automated ignite style presentation that sends commands to
  a connected Parrot AR Drone via socket.io direct from the
  browser.

  setup and run https://github.com/bkw/node-dronestream on port
  3000 at the same time and you'll get a video stream from the
  drone in slide 15

And here's a simulated AR.Drone for voxeljs: https://github.com/shama/voxel-drone

My voice controlled AR.Drone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhBa11gdbeU

This is great I've been looking for an excuse to learn Clojure and I have access to the same model drone.

As an aside this talk is amazing, even more so if you've had any exposure to control theory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4IJXAVXgIo

(if you get bored the best bit is at 20min)

I knew the AR Drone sounded familiar. When I first saw it, I was concerned about the only flying controls being a mobile device (and not a traditional remote). That said, it looks like a ton of fun and the extensibility options are endless.

Still, my personal preference would be a standard quadcopter or plane with an APM [1]. If only I can free up some spending money...

[1] http://store.diydrones.com/APM_2_5_Not_Assembled_p/br-apmpwr...

I kept procrastinating on working on AR-Drone because I didn’t want to do it in JavaScript. This is great.

This is so awesome. A handful of other Stanford students and I entered a Node+AR Drone hackathon in SF[1] a while back and we had a blast.

We had so much fun, in fact, that we integrated AR Drone hacking into the Robotics Club. This started as a few friends messing with 2 drones and its grown to the point where I'm actually teaching NodeJS, Javascript+Coffeescript, a bit of Unix, and various algorithms to 35+ students fresh out of Stanford's Intro to Computer Science course! (Its still mostly the basics, but I've been writing up & posting lesson info here http://drones.johnback.us/).

I'm very excited with what the various AR Drone communities have created so far. The popular Node library[2], a Go implementation (in progress) by the same author[3], and this Clojure option[4] are all amazing avenues for teaching interesting CS languages (that remain largely ignored in formal academics) to students new to CS.

[1] http://dronegames.co/

[2] https://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone

[3] https://github.com/felixge/ardrone

[4] https://github.com/gigasquid/clj-drone

The AR Drone (v1) I had was great and I miss it everyday. I hope they worked out the major kinks in the v2 revision. I ended up returning mine not by choice. I sent it back to the store because the motherboard failed and they sent me store credit instead. I guess too many failures and too many returns made them get out the drone selling business.

The SDK was fairly well equipped and the examples were well documented (this was iOS 3, GB, and C# examples). I don't know how they did it but they have the starter ready-to-run drone market to themselves. All the competitors I've looked at are 2-3x the price. Even the link the above is $179 just for the MB; excluding sensors, motors, batteries, cameras, and crossframe.

It does look fun.

But the programming done here is very imperative and procedural in nature. Not to say it can't or shouldn't be done. It just doesn't seem like a very good case for using a functional programming language, although the title seems to imply that. Anybody attempting to learn Clojure this way is probably missing out on the actual merits of functional programming.

I had never really looked at Clojure before this post and when I saw the code I almost vomited in my mouth from how ugly it is. Then I thought "that can't be what Clojure looks like", Google proved me wrong, and I cried a little bit for all the programmers stuck using this ugly syntax.