RobotsConf was great fun, and oddly enough, it reminded me of Burning Man in two ways.
First, it was overwhelming, in a good way. Second, there was so much to do that the smart way to approach it is probably the same as the smart way to approach Burning Man: go without a plan the first year, make all kinds of crazy plans and projects every subsequent year.
The conf's split between a massive hackerspace, a roughly-as-big lecture space, and a small drone space. You can hop between any/all of these rooms, or sit at various tables outside all these rooms. The table space was like half hallway, half catering zone. Outside, there were more tables, and people also set up a rocket, a small servo-driven flamethrower (consisting of a Zippo and a can of hairspray), and a kiddie pool for robot boats.
I arrived with no specific plans, and spent most of the first day in lectures, learning the basics of electronics, robotics, and wearable tech. But I also took the time, that first day, to link up a
Parrot AR drone with a
Leap Motion controller.
Sorry Rubyists - the code on this one was all Node.js.
Artoo has support for both the Leap Motion and the Parrot AR, but Node has embraced hardware hacking, where Ruby (except for Artoo) kinda remains stuck in 2010.
I started with this code, from the
node-ar-drone
README:
With this, I had the drone taking off into the air, wandering around for a bit, doing a backflip (or I think, more accurately, a sideflip), and then returning to land. Then I plugged in the Leap Motion, and, using Leap's Node library, it was very easy to establish basic control over the drone. The control was
literally manual, in the classic sense of the term - I was controlling a flying robot with my hand.
Here's the code:
As you can see, it's very straightforward.
With this code, when you first put your hand over the Leap Motion, the drone takes off. If you hold your hand high above the Leap, the drone ascends; if you lower it, the drone descends. If you take your hand away completely, the drone lands.
The
frame.gestures.forEach
bit was frankly just a failure. I got no useful results from the gesture recognition whatsoever. I want to be fair to Leap, though, so I'll just point out that I hacked this whole thing together inside about twenty minutes. (Another caveat, though: that twenty minutes came after about an hour or so of utter puzzlement, which ended when I enabled "track web apps" in the Leap's settings, and I got a bunch of help on this from
Andrew Stewart of the Hybrid Group.)
Anyway, I had nothing but easy sailing when it came to the stuff which tracks
pointables
and obtains their X, Y, and Z co-ordinates. I ran off to a lecture after I got this far, but it would be very easy to add turning based on X position, or forward movement based on Z position. If you read the code, you can probably even imagine how that would look. Also, if I'd had a bit more time, I think I probably could have synced flip animations to gestures.
In fact, I've lost the link, but I believe I saw that a pre-teen girl named Super Awesome Maker Sylvia did some of these things at RobotsConf last year, and
a GitHub project already exists for controlling Parrot drones with Leap Motion controllers (it's a Node library, of course). There was a small but clearly thrilled contingent of young kids at RobotsConf, by the way, and it was pretty amazing to see all the stuff they were doing.