Drone – Modern Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)
The term ‘Drone’ was originally applied to pilotless airplanes. In present times, ‘Drone’ has become a buzzword that refers to any modern Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or Unmanned Systems. It is also referred as ‘Quadcopter’ as it is a multi-rotor helicopter that is lifted and propelled by four rotors.
How Drones came into existence?
The history of Drones goes back to year 1915, when A.M.Low’s “Aerial Target” was the earliest attempt as powered UAV. Since then the advances followed and military of various countries confirmed the usage of UAV for defence as well as attacks.
The evolution of drones is remarkable. They have gone from solely military applications to security tasks, and even shrunk to a convenient size for civilian and commercial use.
Application of Drones:
Drones have become so ubiquitous in applications like agriculture, science, journalism, search and rescue, etc. It also helps for reporting in conditions like natural disasters, live sports, surface mapping, covering events, heavy traffics, etc. Apart from government agencies, drones are also being used for civil and commercial use and at hobby level too.
Popular Drones 2016
3D Robotics’ Drones
It is an American Company that designs and manufactures recreational and commercial drones. They have produced ready-to-fly quadcopters that can be used for aerial mapping and photography, and they have developed fixed-wing UAVs based on the Ardupilot platform.
It came up with its 3DR Solo model that has some price cuts than earlier models. But people reported some issues with it like it does not have its own camera and has spotty GPS and short battery life.
Parrot Drones
Parrot SA, a French wireless products manufacturer company, specializes in developing flying robots or drones. Known for its innovative approach, Parrot SA leads the market in drone technology. Its range of products caters to various needs, from consumer entertainment to professional applications. Parrot AR. Drone is one of the popular quadcopter from Parrot, that can be controlled by customised iOS or Android apps for Drone. The latest and improved version, AR.Drone 2.0 is upgraded to improve the drone’s functionality. It comes with more sensitive onboard sensors for more control, enhanced ultrasound altimeter for stable flight, updated Wi-Fi Hardware and extended battery life.
Parrot also launched open API for game development platform. Due to this open source platform, Parrot’s AR.Drone has becoming increasingly popular in research and education. ‘Yet Another Drone’ is an open source framework available to build applications for AR Drone in Java.
Dominance of DJI Drones
As per present market scenario, DJI drone models leads the market. It is a Chinese company that is at forefront of civilian drone industry. One of the eminent product from them is ‘Phantom’, a series of quadcopters that have evolved with integrated flying system with camera, Wi-Fi connectivity, pilot’s mobile device and a controller. These are mostly popular for aerial photography, cinematography applications as well as among hobbyists.
The series evolved as Phantom 2, Phantom 2 Vision+, Phantom 3 Professional, Phantom 3 4K and Phantom 4. The latest in the series, Phantom 4 has some amazing features as:
Tap to Fly feature: This feature allows you to let the drone fly with a tap of the finger. It can fly in any direction without any remote controller.
- Accuracy with hovering: it has improved Vision Positioning System with four sensors that brings increased precision in hovering and reliability. This gives an easier and safer experience to controller. VPS will track Phantom’s movement and return it to its initial hovering position even if it is disturbed while hovering.
- Easy tracking of moving subject: with ActiveTrack, it can track a moving subject in few taps. Turning on the Moving POI allows you to encircle the subject as they move, by dragging subject on screen.
- Improved flight Time: It has got the larger battery that extends the flight time of Phantom 4 to 28 minutes.
- Sport Mode: This feature allows you to fly faster (with top speed of 72 Kph/44.7 mph) and also gives best-in-class flight control.
Raffaello D’Andrea explores the astounding power of drones and demonstrates the drones that balance, play catches and make decisions together.
Programming for Drone
Even though the drone entered the consumer market only in early 2000’s, it got popular extensively. Drone industry comes with huge opportunity of developing customised applications that helps in more controlled and valuable usage of drones in various fields. With the maturing technology, highly priced UAVs became reasonable that came to as low as £400. With this and with the growing importance of drones commercially, software is catching up with the hardware of drones.
Developers can create amazing iOS quadcopter apps and innovative Android quadcopter apps for easy controlling and precision flying. Customised drone apps can let you understand when to fly, identify no flying zones, recommend flying zones/favourable spots, track the drone, draw the path, generate the flying pattern, etc.
DJI Drone Programming
DJI has come up with the latest version of software development kit that would help develop robust application ecosystem for DJI drones. New Mobile SDK 3.0, Onboard SDK and Guidance SDK are available that would facilitate both software and hardware developers.
DJI’s Mobile SDK 3.0 empowers you to develop custom drone mobile apps for Android and iOS. This powerful tool unlocks the full potential of DJI’s aerial platforms, including the Phantom series, Matrice 100, and Inspire Series. Designed specifically for UAVs, the DJI SDK enables robust and customized app development.This enables developer to focus more on developing the core application. Developers use the Mobile SDK to enable mobile devices to communicate with the controller. The Onboard SDK is for communication between onboard devices and flight controller. The Guidance SDK extracts data from DJI Guidance to sense the surrounding environment.All these three SDKs can either work independently or together, equally well. Using the SDKs in collaboration provides a larger and more efficient way of application development.
Scope of App Development for Drones/Quadcopters:
New drone apps can be designed and developed to create astounding experiences in business tools, gamification, entertainment, information display, and more. Flyver, an Android-based open-source framework, facilitates the development of intuitive Android Apps for Quadcopters. The Flyver App Marketplace is available for developers to launch their robust Android Apps for Drones. Tools for smart glasses are being developed to allow drone pilots to monitor their quadcopters. Additionally, there are interesting Apple drone apps available, like Ground Station for DJI hardware and Drone Dance for AR.Drone. Drones offer a broad range of possibilities that are yet to be explored, facilitating many industries on both B2C and B2B services.
Android and iOS App development for 3D Robotics drone
3D Robotics provides a flexible and open source API in Python called as DroneKit. An on-board computer can execute quadcoptor applications developed with this SDK. These applications communicate with the ArduPilot flight controller (Developer Ecosystem) using a low latency link.
Android and iOS app development for parrot drones
Parrot for developers is the new platform developed by Parrot for software developers. SDK 3.9 is the latest and free SDK available for Parrot developers with full documentation. Parrot developers can write the code for smartphones, smartwatches, and VR glasses to develop the next big drone application using the SDK.
Android and iOS app development for DJI drones
The DJI developer’s SDK available for professionals to build apps to supervise and control the drone from any system, either mobile or wearable devices, connected to quadcopter’s automatic pilot through standard interface. DJI’s APIs allows DJI’s developers to build an algorithm that is capable of controlling the drone ‘using any kind of programming language and for different operating systems’.
How development of applications for drones will make a difference?
- Control: Drone apps will allow you to control important flight elements like take-off, route followed by drone and landing.
- Access to the data about route followed: all the data collected by quadcopter will be available from system information in real time. Data like velocity, height, point of origin, destination, possible errors, etc.
- Transmission of this data in real time:
Drone apps enable real-time transmission of the aforementioned data to the control device displaying the UAV’s feed.
- Other Important functionalities like: taking images from air, control of three axes for handling camera angles and stability, extender for greater Wi-Fi Connection, battery information, recording video in real time and many more.
Are you looking for professional quadcopter App Developers or DJI drone app developers? We are a multinational software development and IT solutions company. Our in house team of professional drone programmers are available to provide the biggest advantage out of fast emerging drone industry through developing robust UAV apps for better solutions.
For more insight into flying robots watch Dr. Vijay Kumar’s Talk for his work in building flying robots.
