Uhm, So I added AI to my DIY Drone...

Apr 12, 2024

I crashed my drone 😖.

But I what came next after this is pretty amazing! I started building my own drone from scratch. And by scratch I mean building up the frame, integrating a Pixhawk flight controller with a Raspberry Pi 4.

So when I say that I'm adding AI to the drone, what exactly do I mean?

I mean that I'm adding AI vision for gesture control. So goal is that:

  • If I lift my hands up, then it should take off
  • If I put my arms in the Naruto position (aiming downwards), the drone should land
  • Otherwise follow me along its yaw axis.

Sounds simple right 🤣 😁😅. Wahahahahaa, Oh boy!

The first challenge was just getting the drone off the ground. The PixHawk, I wont like was very challenging just to get the correct firmware let alone calibrate the damn thing.

The first time I tried to fly it, it merely toppled over and caught on fire - AAAaaaahh!!!

Was it completely destroyed?

Well from what I was able to salvage, I patched it back together and after days of tinkering, we finally got our drone up in the air!

Woohoo! Celebrations!

Not quite! The battle was only half over. We still needed to integrate AI for gesture control.

So how did I integrate the AI?

The first step was to collect a bunch of data of me doing the various gestures. I chose to use object detection, since pose estimation was not yet available in the DepthAI library, which was the library that drives the OpenCV AI Kit (OAK) from Luxonis.

I trained the dataset with over 5000 images. I know its a lot of images to annotate for just one person.

Luckily I used this one tool that you will learn about inside the course, to speed up annotation 10 fold. It was quite impressive for a tool that doesn't even use AI.

Once trained, I linked the model via DroneKit which is a framework for the Raspberry Pi to talk to the PixHawk flight controller.

Some coding weeks (these weeks feel like an eternity 🤣) later, my drone was in the air, obeying my every command.

Here is a demo to prove my drone bending skills.

AI in Trading Course

We also have the full documentary of our drone-building rollercoaster which you can watch at our Augmented A I YouTube Channel - Here.

This is super cool, I want to build my own AI Gesture Controlled Drone!

Now while this course is not yet available, it is one of the most exciting courses that will be coming soon to Augmented AI along with the Ironman JARVIS GPT course and more.

If you subscribe as a member to Augmented AI University, you will receive it at no extra charge.

The same goes for any future course that we launch of course. :)

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If you haven't already order, I'm sure by now you may have noticed that prices are going up every day. So order today for only $21.6 per month, you can get this course along with our other cutting-edge AI courses and every new course that we develop thereafter.

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