The worst part about taking your dogs for a walk is carrying the crap bags back to your house. In this video, I design, build, and program a hexacopter drone to autonomously fly to my location, pick up the poop bag, and return it safely home. I'm going to need to build a drone from scratch, figure out how to program it with python, use an AI object detection model to detect the bag from the air, engineer a gripper mechanism to grab the payload, create an app to send my location to the drone, and write an algorithm to land precisely on a target within inches of accuracy. It wasn't easy...
//chapters
00:00 - Intro
01:04 - Build
02:46 - First Flight
05:50 - Stereo Vision
08:33 - Bag Detection
10:55 - Firmware Bug
12:50 - New Approach
15:57 - Bag Landing
21:25 - App
23:01 - Issues Recap
25:48 - Final Mission
30:41 - Conclusion
//source code
I've made most of the code from the project available in the repo linked below.
https://github.com/Carson-Stark/AutonomousDrone
//hardware
(these are Amazon affiliate links, it helps me a bit if you order through them)
Frame - https://amzn.to/4mbMCGy
QWinOut Motors - https://amzn.to/4o5Y7kw
QWinOut Escs - https://amzn.to/46WCvAX
Props - https://amzn.to/3GJAZaW
Pixhawk Flight Controller + GPS Kit - https://amzn.to/3GJAZaW
RC Controller - https://amzn.to/3H35xUX
Battery(6000mAh) - https://amzn.to/4lJftC6
Battery(9000mAh) - https://amzn.to/4kSgqqz
Jetson Nano - https://amzn.to/4lKC01v
Coral USB Accelerator - https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/
Intel RealSense Depth Camera - https://amzn.to/4f7xAiS
LTE USB Modem - https://amzn.to/471Q16r
TMotor Motors - https://store.tmotor.com/product/mn2806-motor-antigravity-type.html
TMotor ESC - https://store.tmotor.com/product/air-20a-4s-esc.html
//socials
Instagram: tesseract.yt
TikTok: tesseractyt
//longer description
Step 1: Build a DIY drone starting with a hexacopter frame, solder speed controllers and motors, attach and calibrate the Pixhawk flight controller, set up the Arducopter / PX4 firmware
Step 2: Mount an Nvidia Jetson nano on the drone with a 3D-printed case, program the Pixhawk to accept commands from the Jetson, which runs Ubuntu.
Step 3: Use a Realsense depth camera combined with ROS to integrate dynamic obstacle avoidance with Arducopter
Step 4: Train a Tensorflow object detection model to detection plastic bags
Step 5: Build a mobile app that can send my GPS coordinates to the drone over the internet via a VPN and cellular internet connection
Step 6: Build the full autonomous mission sequence
Step 7: Pickup doodoo!
//Channels I'm inspired by
Stuff Made Here
Michael Reeves
Mark Rober
William Osman
Peter Stripol
//hashtags
#drone #programming #robotics #python #arduino #autonomousflight #rcplane
//music
Sea - John Vallis (johnvallis.co.uk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0NpCxbU-0o&list=PL9kdTkA1ET4mAvV1IHG4L7MYmUHcEd4gJ&index=2
Epidemic Sound
https://www.epidemicsound.com/
Music from #InAudio: https://inaudio.org/
Hard
Context Sensitive - World's Edge
https://www.youtube.com/ContextSensitive
https://contextsensitive.bandcamp.com/