UAVPC - Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Pose-based Control

A small utility intended to be used with a Raspberry Pi and MPU 6050 IMU. Its goal is to control the flight of a drone using hand gestures (made with the MPU 6050) and display its video feed. It can also detect poses in the video stream through OpenPose.

The names comes from the initial goal, of using the body poses to control the flight of the drone, but due to the unreliable nature of the UDP protocol used in my drone to send the video stream, it was unreliable. This lead to changing it to use gestures made with the MPU 6050.

Features

• Gesture recognition with the MPU 6050 using a Kalman filter. Supported gestures include rotations around the X and Y axis of the IMU.
• Keyboard commands (as seen in the uavpc::Joystick class) for:
  • Sending commands to the drone, to compensate lack of more gestures
  • Toggling on/off pose recognition
  • Toggling on/off video stream saving
• Drone control using either commands or gestures.
  • Currently supported drones: DJI Tello (and any drone using the same API by using the existing classes).

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

The project is meant to run on a Raspberry Pi, connected to a MPU 6050 IMU and a DJI Tello Drone. While not required, I found that using USB tethering on my smartphone was a sufficient way to control the Raspberry Pi in a desktop mode (using VNC).

• CMake v3.15+ - found at https://cmake.org/
• C++ Compiler - needs to support at least the C++17 standard, i.e. GCC, Clang
• OpenPose v1.7.0 - found at https://github.com/CMU-Perceptual-Computing-Lab/openpose
  • In order to make OpenPose v1.7.0 work with OpenCV 4.5.0, I used the patch found at vendor/openpose-opencv4.patch.
• OpenCV 4.5.0 - found at https://github.com/opencv/opencv
• Linux Kernel I2C module - found in the official repos of ArchLinux, RaspbianOS and Ubuntu. Also found at https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/software/utils/i2c-tools/
• Catch2 (for tests) - found at https://github.com/catchorg/Catch2/

Note: You also need to be able to provide CMake a supported generator.

Installing

It is fairly easy to install the project, all you need to do is clone or download it from GitHub.

If you wish to clone the repository, rather than download it, you simply need to run:

git clone https://github.com/filipdutescu/uavpc.git

To install an already built project, you need to run the install target with CMake. For example:

cmake --build build --target install --config Release

# a more general syntax for that command is:
cmake --build <build_directory> --target install --config <desired_config>

or

make install

which will also build the project.

Building the project

To build the project, all you need to do, after correctly installing the project, is run a similar CMake routine to the the one below:

mkdir build/ && cd build/
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/absolute/path/to/custom/install/directory
cmake --build . --target install

or

make release

Note: The custom CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX can be omitted if you wish to install in the default install location.

Generating the documentation

In order to generate documentation for the project, you need to configure the build to use Doxygen. This is easily done, by modifying the workflow shown above as follows:

mkdir build/ && cd build/
cmake .. -Duavpc_ENABLE_DOXYGEN=1 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/absolute/path/to/custom/install/directory
cmake --build . --target doxygen-docs

Note: This will generate a docs/ directory in the project's root directory.

Running the tests

By default, the template uses Catch2 for unit testing. Unit testing can be disabled in the options, by setting the ENABLE_UNIT_TESTING (from cmake/StandardSettings.cmake) to be false. To run the tests, simply use CTest, from the build directory, passing the desire configuration for which to run tests for. An example of this procedure is:

cd build          # if not in the build directory already
ctest -C Release  # or `ctest -C Debug` or any other configuration you wish to test

# you can also run tests with the `-VV` flag for a more verbose output (i.e.
#Catch2 output as well)

To build and run tests you can also use:

make test

Contributing

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our how you can become a contributor and the process for submitting pull requests to us.

Versioning

This project makes use of SemVer for versioning. A list of existing versions can be found in the project's releases.

Authors

• Filip-Ioan Dutescu - @filipdutescu

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 - see the LICENSE file for details.