The new app (v0.9.1) is on Google Play. One nice new feature is the Record-Me.
The update
The new version has the following updates ( v0.9.1 over v0.9.0):
Record-Me mode
Nicer Icons
Portuguese Translation
Improvements to the HUD
Change the default alt. to 50m
Option to select diferent baud rates
Option to keep the screen at full brightness
Fix a bug with the Volume Control
Fix bug in the RC Override screen
Record-Me
This is an interesting feature, you record a path and make you UAV follow it (J-DeMarco). I'll describe how it works:
- Enable GPS on your Android Device
- Go to the planning screen
- Click on RECORD
- Walk around (it will record a waypoint every 2s)
- Hit RECORD again, it should say "file saved"
Now you have just created a file with the path you just walked, if you want load up the file and push it to your ArduPilot board and make your drone fly it. The image at the top of the post was made using this mode by taking a ride around my neighborhood.
How was it done
One nice thing with this version is that it is all done on top of the community work, I just did some review, re-factoring to keep-up the code base clean, testing, and merging. Here are some stats on the work we did from the last version:
6 authors have pushed 45 commits to all branches, excluding merges. On master, 24 files have changed and there have been 864 additions and 339 deletions. For more info go here.
For more information I suggest the DroidPlanner Wiki page. And as always if you want to help consider donating for the project by buying this app, joining the development team, or reporting a issue/bug/improvement on GitHub.
Comments
Thanks for the info. It would certainly be nice if GPS altitude could be recorded as an option as well (hopefully it can be accurate enough to be useful). And yes, it would be helpful to have the options to record waypoints everytime you move some distance instead of every 2s. Even better if it could detect curvature of the route so that extra waypoints could be recorded at corners to avoid corner cutting.
David Dewey:
It uses the default altitude from the planning screen, just like adding waypoints in a mission in the planning screen.
Currently it doesn't because only the latitude and longitude are used from the GPS, altitude is received via the def. alt in the planning screen.
DroidPlanner is designed to use only absolute altitude (but we are working in giving the user the option of relative altitude). In APM the home is set on the first GPS lock, but using absolute altitude means that your flight altitude isn't modified.
From online review the GPS on the Nexus 7 seams to be good, but I don't have one so it's hard to speak qualitatively. My tablet doesn't seam to report the height in the GPS data, that is way I'm not using this information to generate the Record-me mission.
What about adding a waypoint every time you move some distance, and set the time/distance in a preference setting?
I hope we can improve the record-me mode to make it more useful. Here is the file if you want more info:
https://github.com/arthurbenemann/droidplanner/blob/master/DroidPla...
How does the waypoint altitude get set for Record-Me? Does it work if you record over terrain with steeply variable elevation? Since APM uses relative alt, how is the home altitude defined? Does the Nexus 7 have sensitive enough GPS to give reasonably precise altitude estimates?
I think it would be cool to do a mountain hike while recording a track, then fly the same track, but at 50 meters over terrain elevation so it wouldn't hit the trees. It would need to be a lot longer than 2s interval between waypoints though, since APM has a limited number of waypoints. And I would use SplineNav to fly my copter on a smooth curve connecting the waypoints. That should make for a nice video to show off a favorite hiking route.
I think this record me is going to kill at the annual spark fun competition rover section.
Currently Record-Me is very crude, and just generates a waypoint from your GPS position every 2s, it's up to your UAV/UGV to follow it. If there is interest we can develop a way to clean the generated mission.
I haven't thought of using a UGV yet, record me could be nice in that application. Maybe even generate a better route because it would suffer the same multi-path problems.
I have a question. How do you prevent a UAV/UGV from moving in a curly-cue pattern when attempting to navigate through a list of closely-spaced waypoints that would be created with the Record Me feature? Is it a matter of tuning PID loops or something else?
@Ian Bashir:
It's a great choice, and you can be sure that DroidPlanner will be compatible. But you can get by using a cheaper tablet (I use one of those), but it may not be so smooth.
looking great!
Is the Nexus 7 the best choice for this GCS?
Darren Royle :
Have you done a flight test with the record-me function?
Just loaded onto my nexus . It works a treat with my quad on 2.9.b.
love the record function .
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