This code integrates DroneKit flight control with a real-time Mediapipe hand-tracking system, allowing an ArduPilot drones to be flown using gesture-based RC overrides or keyboard fallback.
- Drone and communication libraries
The code uses DroneKit, which provides the Python API to connect to ArduPilot (SITL or a real drone), change flight modes, send RC override commands, arm the vehicle, and perform takeoff/landing. DroneKit depends on pymavlink, which handles MAVLink protocol communication in the background. These two libraries are essential for all drone-related operations in the script.
- Computer vision and webcam handling
For video capture and image frames, the code uses OpenCV (cv2). This library accesses the webcam, resizes frames, draws UI overlays (such as dead-bands), and displays the hand-tracking video window. Without OpenCV, no camera input or real-time visualization would be possible.
- Hand-tracking AI models
Hand detection and landmark tracking are powered by MediaPipe, specifically the mediapipe.solutions.hands model. This library performs palm detection, wrist-point extraction, and landmark estimation in real time. MediaPipe runs lightweight machine-learning models optimized for fast inference on consumer hardware, enabling gesture control without needing a GPU.
- System, math, and threading utilities
Standard Python libraries like threading, time, queue, and math support the program’s internal operations. Threading enables the hand-tracking loop to run in parallel with the drone-control loop, ensuring minimal latency. The msvcrt library is required on Windows for non-blocking keyboard input handling, allowing simultaneous keyboard + gesture control.
- Installation summary
To run this code successfully, the required install commands are:
pip install dronekit pymavlink opencv-python mediapipe
DroneKit and pymavlink enable MAVLink communication with ArduPilot, OpenCV handles the camera and UI overlay, and MediaPipe provides advanced hand-tracking. These libraries work together to create a full gesture-controlled drone interface.