BAM days 2021

BAM days 2021

THE BAM days 2021 are finished!

Thanks to everybody that attendeded and participated! We will soon release the recordings here and our our youtube channel.

Summary

Introducing the Bitcraze Awesome Meetup (BAM) days: a free, three-day convention celebrating the 10 year anniversary of Bitcraze. The program is organized around three themes: Positioning, the AI-deck and Swarming.

There will be guest speakers, workshops, Q&As and most-importantly… social events. We hope to meet you there, hear what you are working on and discuss future possibilties of what we can achieve with the Crazyflie eco system!


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Detailed Program

All times are presented in Central European Summer Time (CEST). Be aware that this schedule is still subjected to change in the coming weeks.

Time Tuesday 19 Oct Wednesday 20 Oct Thursday 21 Oct
09:30 Opening    
10:00 Klaus Kefferpütz (HS Augsburg)
Topic: Crazyflie quadcopter in decentralized swarming
Daniele Palossi (PULP-platform)
Topic: Deep Learning on AIdeck            
Wolfgang Hönig (TU Berlin)
Topic: Crazyswarm: A powerful framework for aerial swarms
10:30
11:00 Fika Fika Workshop: Swarming with CFlib
11:30 Workshop: Positioning Systems Quiz! Fika
12:00 Fika Community Roundtable Q&A Panel: Swarm Management tools Bitcraze W. Hönig
12:30 Lunch Lunch Lunch
13:00
13:30 Joseph La Delfa (KTH):
Topic: Moving a drone with your body
Francesco Paci (Greenwaves Tech.)
Topic: Machine learning on GAP8 for tiny devices
Workshop: Bolt and BQ deck
14:00 Fika
14:30 Fika Fika Guido de Croon & Bart Duisterhof (MAVlab)
Topic: Fully autonomous CrazyFlie swarms
15:00 M. Sjölin & M. Holmberg (Qualisys)
Topic: Motion Capture
Workshop: Autonomy and app layer
15:30 Fika Fika
16:00 Fika Workshop: Rust and the Crazyflie Workshop: Autonomous Swarm Demo
16:30 Workshop: Advanced Lighthouse Usage Fika
17:00 Fika Community Roundtable Q&A >Future plans of Bitcraze and closing of BAM days
17:30 Quiz! Closing party
18:00

Social Events

Fika

We take coffeebreaks very seriously at Bitcraze. This is were we discuss our dreams, issues and crazy ideas for new products. We therefore also wanted to translate these Fika (Swedish for Coffeebreak) moments in our BAM days. So after every workshop and talk we made sure that we have planned in enough time for us to come and connect in our networking area and discuss and talk to eachother.

We will be doing this in MiBo. Check out the event platform information for more information!

Quiz

A quiz about everything crazyflie and Bitcraze with prices to win, you don’t want to miss this!

GoldenFlie

Community Roundtable Q&A

We have a couple of questions to you, our community members! We would like to know your opinion on how we should handle the Crazyflie community, like: How would you like us to communicate our internal plans? How can we make it easier for researchers to contribute? On which social media platforms should we focus on? We hope it will be a fruitfull discussion!

Closing Party

The BAMdays is a celebration of our 10 year anniversary, so let’s socialize and party in one of the Disco MiBo rooms!


Speakers

We’re really excited and happy to welcome all the awesome speakers! They will tell us about their work, how they use the Crazyflie and much more.

Day 1

19th of October

K. Kefferpütz, T. Izycki, S. Zittenzieher, C. Zosimidis

10:00 CEST

Klaus Thomas, Simon and Christos

Affiliation: Hochschule Augsburg

Presentation Title: “Crazyflie quadcopter in decentralized swarming”

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Bio:

Klaus Kefferpütz (Prof. Dr.-Ing.) is professor for measurement and control at the University of Applied Research Augsburg, Germany and head of the Cooperative Control Lab established in 2019. His research objective are algorithms for cooperative coordination, navigation and estimation in decentralized multi-agent-systems. Currently, he is working on improving the Crazyflie navigation abilities by means of cooperative navigation. Having received his Diploma and Ph.D. in nonlinear control methods for input constrained systems from the Technical University Darmstadt in 2008 and in 2012, he worked 6 years as development and systems engineer at MBDA Germany GmbH working on algorithms for guidance, control, navigation and estimation/tracking.

Thomas Izycki received his B. Eng. in Engineering in Computer Sciences from the University of Applied Research Augsburg, in 2021. Since April 2021 he is pursuing his Master of Applied Research in Engineering (MAPR) – a research project-oriented Master-program – at the Cooperative Control Lab. His project focus is on cooperative, decentralized path planning and exploration for multi-robot teams. He is working as student assistant at the Cooperative Control Lab since 2019 and his Bachelor Thesis was the integration of a configurable Zynq-7000 series system-on-chip module into a quadcopter drone for hardware-accelerated in-flight image processing.

Simon Zittenzieher received his B. Eng. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Applied Research Augsburg, in 2021. Currently, he is studying in the Master of Mechanical Engineering program. In his Bachelor-Thesis, he focused on the development of an autonomous exploration strategy for programmable mini-quadcopters employing artificial neural networks. He will continue his work in this field as a student assistant at the Cooperative Control Lab in parallel to his Master-studies.

Christos Zosimidis received his B. Eng. in Engineering in Computer Sciences from the University of Applied Research Augsburg in 2021. Since October 2021 he is working as Embedded Software Developer at Engineering Office for Thermoacoustic (IfTA) GmbH in Puchheim, Munich. He worked as a student assistant in the Cooperative Control Lab from October 2019 to September 2021 focusing on decentralized communication strategies for the Crazyflie. In his Bachelor-Thesis, he applied this strategy for cooperative path planning for a swarm of mini-quadcopters

Joseph La Delfa

13:30 CEST

Joseph La Delfa

Affiliation: KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Presentation Title: ‘Moving a drone with your whole body - Understanding the design of human drone interactions’

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Bio:

Joseph is a PhD student from the Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design at KTH University Stockholm. His research is about designing small drones that can be directly manipulated by different parts of the body. This is done by making the drone respond to small changes in movement, breath and balance. Through this work he aims to investigate ways in which we come to appreciate how we move our bodies in our everyday lives.

Joseph’s personal homepage

M. Sjölin & M. Holmberg

15:00 CEST

Magnus and Martin

Affiliation: Qualisys

Presentation Title: Qualisys’ Motion Capture System

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Magnus Sjölin and Martin Holmberg are from Qualisys. The Swedish motion capture company.

Qualisys is a leading provider of precision motion capture and 3D positioning tracking system. With a +30 years-long history of supplying a variety of industries with high-end camera systems and expertise. Indoor, outdoor, ground-to-air or underwater – no matter what condition, they have your solution.

Day 2

20th of October

Daniele Palossi

10:00 CEST

Daniele Palossi

Affiliation: PULP-Platform, IDSIA (USI-SUPSI), IIS (ETH Zürich)

Title Presentation: “Deep learning-based autonomous navigation using the Crazyflie nano-drone”

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Bio:

Daniele Palossi received the Ph.D. in Information Technology and Electrical Engineering from the ETH Zürich, in 2019. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), USI-SUPSI, Lugano, Switzerland, and at the Integrated Systems Laboratory (IIS), ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland. His research focuses on the embedded domain with special emphasis on energy-efficient ultra-low-power platforms, algorithms for autonomous navigation, and resource-constrained small-sized cyber-physical systems. His work has resulted in 20+ publications in international conferences and journals. Dr. Palossi was a recipient of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Spark Grant and the 2nd prize at the Design Contest held at the ACM/IEEE ISLPED’19.

Francesco Paci

13:30 CEST

Francesco Paci

Affiliation: GreenWaves Technologies

Title Presentation: “Machine learning on GAP8 for tiny devices”

Read more

Bio:

Francesco Paci received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer engineering from the University of Bologna, where he also pursued the Ph.D. degree in electronics, telecommunications, and information technologies with a thesis on Electronic Systems with High Energy Efficiency for Embedded Computer Vision. He was a Visiting Student with Trinity College Dublin, a Visiting Researcher with Movidius (now Intel Movidius), Dublin, in 2014, and STMicroelectronics, Grenoble, in 2012. Since 2017 he holds a full time position at Greenwaves-Technologies as R&D software engineer.

Day 3

21th of October

Wolfgang Hönig

10:00 CEST

wolfgang hoenig

Affiliation: TU Berlin

Title Presentation: “Crazyswarm: A powerful framework for aerial swarms in research and education”

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Bio:

Wolfgang Hönig is an independent junior research group leader at TU Berlin, Germany, heading the Intelligent Multi-Robot Coordination Lab. Previously, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, USA. He received the diploma in Computer Science from TU Dresden, Germany in 2012, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Southern California (USC), USA in 2016 and 2019, respectively. His research focuses on enabling large teams of physical robots to collaboratively solve real-world tasks, using tools from informed search, optimization, and machine learning. Wolfgang has been using the Crazyflie since 2014, co-developed the Crazyswarm to fly up to 49 Crazyflies in 2016, and was a visiting research scientist at Bitcraze in 2021.

G. de Croon & B. Duisterhof

14:30 CEST

bart and guido

Affiliation: MAVlab, TU Delft

Title Presentation: “Fully autonomous CrazyFlie swarms”

Read more

Abstract: Swarms of autonomous drones can help humans in search-and-rescue missions, in keeping track of the stock in warehouses or in monitoring crop in greenhouses. We are convinced that such complex tasks can and even should be performed by drones the size of BitCraze’s CrazyFlies. Tiny drones like the CrazyFlie are very safe for humans, suitable for flying in narrow environments, and quite cheap so that they can be produced in large numbers. However, it is also notoriously hard to make such tiny drones fly completely autonomously. Due to their extremely low weight, they are very limited in terms of energy and payload. This implies that they can carry few sensors and extremely little processing compared to, e.g., self-driving cars. In our talk, we will talk about the effort at TU Delft’s MAVLab to make swarms of tiny autonomous drones, and how we approach this by drawing inspiration from insect intelligence. We will present our work on ultra-light autonomous drones such as the 20 gram “DelFly Explorer”. Our focus will be on swarming, and on making tiny drones localize with respect to the other swarm members. We will also talk about two different studies in which swarms of Crazyflies perform incredibly complex tasks. In the first study, a swarm of CrazyFlies is able to explore an unknown environment and come back to the departure point. In the second study, a swarm of CrazyFlies is able to autonomously localize gas sources in complex environments. In our talk we argue that CrazyFlie drones will turn out to be useful far beyond motion tracking arenas.

Bio:

Guido de Croon: Received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. His research interest lies with computationally efficient, bio-inspired algorithms for robot autonomy, with an emphasis on computer vision. Since 2008 he has worked on algorithms for achieving autonomous flight with small and light-weight flying robots, such as the DelFly flapping wing MAV. In 2011-2012, he was a research fellow in the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency, where he studied topics such as optical flow based control algorithms for extraterrestrial landing scenarios. After his return at TU Delft, his work has included fully autonomous flight of a 20-gram DelFly, a new theory on active distance perception with optical flow, and a swarm of tiny drones able to explore unknown environments. Currently, he is Full Professor at TU Delft and scientific lead of the Micro Air Vehicle lab (MAVLab) of Delft University of Technology

Bio:

Bart Duisterhof received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. His interests lie in efficient algorithms for robot autonomy of tiny flying machines. From 2016 to 2020 he worked with Professor Guido de Croon, first exploring visual servoing of the DelFly Nimble, a 30-gram flapping wing MAV. Later they contributed the first fully autonomous swarm of gas-seeking nano quadcopters, Sniffy Bug. In 2019 Bart was a visiting research fellow at Harvard University with Vijay Janapa Reddi, where he studied applications of deep reinforcement learning on nano drones. He is currently a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University.


Workshops & Demos

We will also give workshops about the inner workings of the Bitcraze Ecosystem and all beyond! Join if you want to learn more of what makes the Crazyflie tick!

Day 1

19th of October

Crazyflie and Positioning Systems

11:30 CEST

We will give a basic introduction to different position systems, how they work and how they fit into the Crazyflie ecosystem. Using different demos we will also be looking at how the Crazyflie performs using different positioning systems as well as some of the strengths and weaknesses of the different technologies. If you’re interested in positioning with the Crazyflie you should definitely join this session!

Advanced Lighthouse Usage

16:30 CEST

If you have already gone through the lighthouse tutorial, but you would like to know what really goes on behind the scenes? In this workshop we will give more advanced knowledge about our newest positioning system. From the Base station’s machanics, calibration & geometry estimation, to using Lighthouse Positioning system in a swarm: we will go through it all!

Day 2

20th of October

Autonomy and the App layer

15:00 CEST

If you want the Crazyflie to fly by itself without any manual involvement, it is important to know the different layers of autonomy and its influence on the communication between the computer and the drone. The App-layer, the ability to have a fully autonomous Crazyflie without any PC communication at all, will be especially highlighted in this workshop. Finally, we will give you some crucial tips on how plan your workflow from abstract ideas to actual autonomous flight.

RUST and the Crazyflie

16:00 CEST

Rust is an exciting, relatively new programming language that promises performance, reliability and productivity. It is starting to become quite popular for system programming and we believe it might finaly be the modern language that can replace C in embedded systems. In this workshop we will quickly go over the language and the different use we can have for it in the Crazyflie ecosystem. Then, we will write the push demo Crazyflie App in Rust to explore how rust can be used in the Crazyflie firmware.

Day 3

21th of October

Swarming with the CFlib

11:00 CEST

Controlling a swarm with the cflib, is it possible? And if so, when should you do it? This talk will showcase what the Bitcraze Python library offers in terms of swarm control and what limitations the Python code put on multi-peer communication. We will also show you a demo of swarm flight implemented using under 100 lines of code.

Panel Discussion

Bolt and BQ deck

13:30 CEST

You think the payload capability of the Crazyflie 2.1 is not enough, then the BigQuad deck or Bolt could be the solution for you. We will talk about the design and how to get something bigger into the air as well as future work.

Autonomous Swarm Demo

16:00 CEST

A distributed autonomous Swarm workshop and Demo

Future of Bitcraze

17:00 CEST

What plans do we have in the future? Here we will explain what we have decided to work on for the next year and talk about our 3 year dream. Also we will share some of the awesome prototypes that we are working on currently during our Fun Fridays.


Event Platform

Welkom Platform

WelkomPlatform

For the BAM days we will be using the Welkom platform which is originally from the Netherlands. We felt that this platfrom had a high emphatize to natural social experience. Moreover, it was very natural interface, so people can navigate through it without an extensive guide.

The platform will contain a mainstage for the keynote talks, rooms for the workshops and networking and the location to all of the social events as well.

Networking in Mibo

WelkomPlatform

The Welkom platform we’ll use hosts MiBo rooms. It’s a spatial chat, where your avatar can run around a 3D world, discovering different environments. Your camera is your head, so you’ll need a webcam to join. There are some fun activities around, plenty interactive stuff, from chairs to basketballs. We have used it to for our coffee breaks when we were working from home, and had fun using this world: we’ll be happy to meet you there and hope you’ll find it fun too.

Currently we are planning to host two Mibo rooms, one to meet the speakers, available after every workshop and talk, and one to just have a break, explore the work and meet eachother.

Using the latest version of google chrome, microsoft edge or any other chromium browser is advised. Firefox has been reported to work for the regular talks and the event platform, but it will not work for the Mibo intergration.