Hello, my name is Rakshak and I wanted to share my project, the RAVN, which enables your drone to be easy to program and build autonomous applications for.
The reason we're developing the RAVN is because I found programming drones to be a far cry from the ease of programming computers. When you program a computer you have communities sharing plenty of existing code, support, and know-how.
If you program a drone using a popular flight controller such as a Pixhawk you'll find yourself swamped trying to program at a low level, using new tools with minimal support, and scattered resources.
Our platform on the other hand is designed to leverage existing code by installing a mini computer directly on your drone. This makes it easy for integrating existing computer vision scripts for environmental monitoring, easily adding any additional sensors, and continually upgrading the development experience.
If you are interested in building the future of drones and unleashing their potential in personal missions, robotics competitions, etc. Please click here for more information and reply below. I'm more than happy to answer any questions.
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The purpose of the RAVN is to support drone development by building a community, lowering the entry barrier, and providing a full made package.
Our goal is for anyone to be able to use any embedded linux computer, simply download our package, and begin developing on drones without hassle. We're initially going with the Raspberry Pi because of large community support, small form factor, and low cost. You're more than free to use a much more powerful board if you desire. Just simply install the RAVN software.
We're opening up the source code of the RAVN next week.
The RAVN has 2 parts. The client and the server.
The RAVN client is what you write. It's the API that makes drone flight control and data acquisition straightforward.
The RAVN server handles the client requests and is currently written in Python and built on top of DroneAPI and MAVProxy as a proof of concept. We're building our own C++ server as a drop in replacement. This will improve performance and allow multiple client scripts to run in parallel.
We're also planning on writing client libraries for other languages such as Node.js, Ruby, and C++. We will initially support Python.
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Thank You!
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Awesome. Bookmarked and kept in mind. Best of luck.
Note:
This is a repost, because the original blog was accidently deleted while we were editing. Please continue discussions here. We have all of your previous comments in our email inbox. Your responses are very helpful and we want to continue this discussion.
Yes, everything will be open source. We plan to have our software to work on any embedded Linux computer.
Most important question, are you planning to make it all open source?