3DR announces DroneKit, a full-featured SDK for drones, mobile and cloud

We’re thrilled to announce the release of DroneKit, an open platform for drone app development. DroneKit packages years of 3DR’s flight control R&D into a single robust and extensible platform which developers can use to create web-based drone apps, or even apps onboard the drones themselves. DroneKit works with any vehicle powered by the APM flight code.

Why now

We want to empower makers anywhere to create apps that fit their purposes. Imagine an agriculture app that surveys your land; a search & rescue app; a football practice app. Before DroneKit, if you wanted to create any of these single-purpose apps for a drone you’d have to reinvent the wheel, building all the flight control software from the ground up. DroneKit abstracts away the hard parts of writing flight control software, leaving you a clean, modern interface to code on.

A good analogy is the smartphone: In order to make a smartphone app, you don’t need to design and create a phone first. The hard part (the platform, in other words) is already done. With DroneKit, we’ve made the phone, so to speak. Now everyone has the creative freedom to build apps and new functions.

“Unlike other APIs for drones, there are no levels of access to DroneKit; it’s completely flexible and open,” noted Brandon Basso, 3DR’s VP of Software Engineering. “The platform works on laptops as well as mobile devices. Best of all, once an app is created, the app automatically works on any computing platform—the interface is always the same.”

Our role is to maintain DroneKit: we created the API; we’ll fix any issues with it; we assure it works with all APM vehicles; we add experimental features from our labs and from those contributed by the global community, and we make all updates available to anyone for free. And should you develop an app, just put it up on 3DR Services, “the app store for drones,” where you can price it how you want, and we won’t take anything off the top. DroneKit is a community garden for technology; we want anyone to be able to use it to cultivate and take their product to market.

What you can do with DroneKit:

With DroneKit, you can develop apps for three platforms: mobile apps (DroneKit Android); web-based apps (DroneKit Cloud); and onboard computer apps (DroneKit Python) [i.e., for a companion computer on the actual drone].

DroneKit allows you to:

Fly paths with waypoints
Fly in spline path with fine grain control over vehicle velocity and position
Have the drone follow a GPS target
Control the camera and gimbal with regions of interest points
Access full telemetry from the drone over 3DR Radio, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or over the internet
View playbacks and log analysis of any mission

Advantages of DroneKit:

Truly open; no “levels” of access that you get from other proprietary programs
Computer agnostic: Create an app for controlling drones on whatever computing platform you want, and the interface is always the same
Works on planes, copters and rovers
Works on laptop computers as well as mobile devices
Provides web-based access to vehicle data

DroneKit powers the most successful flight control programs in the world:

Tower (formerly Droidplanner), hands-down the best flight planning mobile app out there, was built on DroneKit for Android
Droneshare, the global social network for drone pilots, is built on DroneKit web services
Project Tango Indoor Navigation is built on Pixhawk, APM and Tower
IMSI/Design TurboSite aerial reporting app for construction

Online Access

To find out how to write your own application for UAVs, and to walk through some example apps from us, please visit http://dronekit.io

pip install droneapi-python

The command results in a library not found by the wynpython command prompt pip command:
Can anyone advise on how to install this python dronekit library on windows ? (on correct the dronekit.io web site with correct instructions)

Thx

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Comments

Wiki Ninja

Hamish Willee June 3, 2015 at 4:19pm

Thanks :-) It is easy to miss instructions even if you're careful. Personally I think the default settings should just work out of the box. I'll think about this some more.
Wiki Ninja

Hamish Willee June 3, 2015 at 3:18pm

Hi Marcel,

You are most welcome!

As a rule paths in MAVProxy are relative to wherever you started it. The vehicles are started from the ardupilot/VehicleName directory, which is why the above path is correct. You should also be able to put in a full path (though I have found that in some case using ~ as a proxy for the home directory does not work on Mavproxy in linux.

I'm not sure the best way to help people avoid this issue. Do you think it would help if I added a "Troubleshooting" section to http://python.dronekit.io/examples/running_examples.html ?

Regards

H
Wiki Ninja
Hamish Willee June 2, 2015 at 4:01pm
HI Marcel

When I run simple_goto it looks the same, except the Altitude climbs to the target height.

I have seen something similar when using the default vehicle parameters though. Can you please try loading the parameters in your simulated environment again (before the arming check):
```
  param load ../Tools/autotest/copter_params.parm
```
Regards

H
Wiki Ninja

Hamish Willee June 1, 2015 at 4:46pm

Hi dronebohne,

Yes, re-sync with the latest master codeline for the example and try again. The example no longer uses the channel_override because that is not the recommended approach for getting off the ground. Instead it uses takeoff command. You can see the source for that that in the example page for simple_goto (see also the new Taking off guide).

Now the fact that if fails is still a potential problem. Do you have the same issue (after re-syncing) if you run the vehicle_state example (this uses channel override)?

Regards

Hamish
MR60

Hugues March 30, 2015 at 10:14am

Another question : is there an explicit documentation of this python droneapi library and typically I am looking for a code example to read a parameter in pixhawk from a python script running on windows (and without having to use the manual mavproxy command line interface). Can you post such example ?

It would be great!
MR60

Hugues March 30, 2015 at 5:30am

Ok thx Kevin. So If I understood it correctly, the dronekit Library is the droneapi that is packaged already in the precompiled Mavproxy for Windows ?
MR60
Hugues March 29, 2015 at 4:56am
The instructions "Getting started" for python, for windows are not working and have no links to the dronekit library. I am referring to this part :

Set up DroneKit¶

The DroneKit library is available on the public pypi repository. You can use the PyPi tool to install.
pip install droneapi-python

The command results in a library not found by the wynpython command prompt pip command:
Can anyone advise on how to install this python dronekit library on windows ? (on correct the dronekit.io web site with correct instructions)

Thx
https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3701969630?profile=original
Fredia Huya-Kouadio March 28, 2015 at 11:05am

@Daniel Nugent 3DR Services is Android deamon (backend layer) used for accessing DroneKit on Android powered devices.
Jack Crossfire March 27, 2015 at 7:51pm

Time to change the name to 3D Salesforce.
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson March 27, 2015 at 4:40am

Broken link fixed. Sorry about that!

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Comments

Set up DroneKit¶