What has our intern, Zhouxin, been up to?

This is it. The end of my internship. It feels strange to leave this unique office in a place called Malmö. My time spent here was more than just doing an assignment as part of a MSc. degree with the objective that I would gain working experience and contribute to a company.

My last day at the office of Bitcraze, Arnaud was already on parental leave

My time here gave me so much more. I have learned here a healthy way of thinking and problem solving which is part of the unique Bitcraze company culture. Next to that, it felt more like working with friends than just working with colleagues. Going to the office is a delight, as there is always humor, openness and honesty. I got to know everyone and enjoy the French, Swedish and Dutch-American hospitality and culture.

At this point you might think that I only have been drinking coffee and made sure that coffee in the office was not below level. Luckily that was not the case. I had the privilege to be the first user for a new deck. This deck has been in development for quite some time now and has been glossed over in some earlier blog posts. It is the yet to-be-released AI-Deck! At the moment the early-access AI-Decks are a delayed due to the COVID-19 virus. Bitcraze will update you on the blog when they know more. 

My task within Bitcraze, in more detail, was to improve user friendliness of the AI-Deck by providing a framework for future users and at the same time to explore user friendliness of the whole ecosystem around the AI-Deck for an engineering student with beginner experience in embedded programming (e.g. me).

At the verge of giving the Crazyflie some AI capabilities, while being micromanaged.

So my mission began. A logical step was to see if the convolutional neural network from the PULP-DroNet project would run on the AI-Deck and fly with the Crazyflie, as the AI-Deck is an evolution of the PULP-Shield developed for this project. More information about this can be found here.

Unfortunately, this was not an easy feat as the PULP-DroNet project is using the pure version of the PULP SDK and an outdated autotiler. While the development partner for the AI-Deck, Greenwaves Technologies, uses the PULP SDK as a base with added functionalities in their SDK, which made it divert from the SDK used in the PULP-DroNet project. 

Though, I was able to run the convolutional neural network in a simulated environment and compare this to the original DroNet that was implemented using Python and a Bebop. It was interesting to find out that the convolutional neural network of PULP-DroNet was behaving differently than the original DroNet in Python. There can be many explanations for this, but the main hypothesis is that this is caused by quantizing the network of PULP-DroNet from 32-bit floating point to 16-bit fixed point. In addition, the aforementioned network is trained on a larger dataset which included data created by a Himax camera.

A single Crazyflie obtained self-awareness and spun up a swarm of Crazyflies to gain world domination

While porting PULP-DroNet to the AI-Deck should be possible, the obstacles found along the way made it too troublesome and out of scope for my internship. So I moved on with the main objective, making a framework/example for the AI-Deck using the SDK provided by Greenwaves Technologies, which is called the GAP8 SDK. It contains a set of tools that should make the use of the AI-Deck easier, namely the NNTool and Autotiler tool. These tools make sure that you can automate the conversion of your neural network that is designed and trained in Python (Tensorflow and Keras) to a neural network code that can utilize the GAP8 functionalities.

My internship came to an end before I could overcome the last hurdle for a working example. To still bring this example to you, I have committed the doc/code I wrote and handed over the knowledge that I have accumulated throughout my internship when working with the AI-Deck and its environment to the capable minds of Kimberly and Tobias.

Along the way I have learned a lot about embedded programming and being a first product user. In addition with embedded programming and programming in general comes a different mindset than a conventional planning and deadline fixed mindset you get from university. With these valuable lessons in mind, I will be heading back to the TU Delft to start with my master thesis in either reinforcement learning for aircrafts or dense optical flow nets for quadcopters. Thank you Bitcraze for your time, experience and hospitality!

2 comments on “What has our intern, Zhouxin, been up to?

  • I was doing a research on open source drone platforms and passed by here, had to say good luck for you and the wonderful company, you are doing an amazing job out there, keep it up and stay safe.

    Yours J

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