In just about 2 weeks, it’s ICRA 2023, which, as you could guess from the title of the post, is in London. The ExCel venue will welcome the world’s top academics, researchers, and industry representatives from May 29 to June 2nd, and that’s something we don’t want to miss.
ICRA is a conference that we hold dear and attended quite a few times – whether in person or online. We’ll be holding a booth there so don’t hesitate to pass by to say hello and see our demo!
We will be using the same demo as the one from IROS 2022; a fully decentralized swarm with the Lighthouse system. What we changed is that now we will be using the Crazyradio 2.0. We’re working on updating the demo and seeing what can be improved in the time we have before the conference. As a bonus, we plan to bring some prototypes and surprises; just to show off all the work we’ve been doing since our last conference in Japan. We will also have Matej Karasek, our partner from Flapper Drones with us in the booth! A good occasion to see his Nimble + in action and ask him all your questions.
Additionally, on Friday afternoon there will be a half-day workshop called ‘The Role of Robotics Simulators for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles’ that we helped organized. This workshop gathers researchers who have struggled to find, customize, or design a robotic simulator for their own purposes or specific application; so don’t hesitate to join if you’ve worked (or plan to) with drone simulation. All the information are here, be sure to sign up for it at your ICRA registration if you’re interested. It can also be attended by a stream by signing up for the virtual ICRA conference.
So we hope to see you in London, at booth H10 for good discussions, interesting conversations, and eventually a cup of tea!
I talked about it here already in October, but there is a lot we want to do here at Bitcraze- and not enough people to do it. So, we’re still looking for a new team member! You can read more about our requirements here; if you’re a polyvalent developer interested in hardware, with an open mind and the willingness to move to Malmö, don’t hesitate to apply by sending us an email: job@bitcraze.se.
We’ve actually also started the search for another job. But first a little background: each morning, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, we pack and ship our orders. Someone takes 1, 2, or even 3 hours to make sure every order passes the door. In 2022, the median time between when you would buy our products and the moment it’s shipped was 1 day. It’s something that is usually common in a big company with a whole warehouse and a team dedicated to that… But at Bitcraze, the warehouse is actually a space in our flight arena and we’re only 6 people. To have more time for development, we’re now looking for someone, ideally a student, to help us out a few hours a week packing and shipping. So if you happen to know anyone near Malmö that fits the description, send him this blog post!
And, since I don’t want to tell you the same thing that I talked about in my last blog post, and it’s International Worker’s Day, I’ve decided to make an extremely subjective list of all the awesome advantages there are working at Bitcraze. So here are perks that you get at Bitcraze that you’ll get nowhere else:
The flexibility to do what you’re most passionate about, and the encouragement to do so. You love printers? RUST? You get excited talking about a new LED or cool stickers? You’ll get the opportunity to fulfill your geekiest dream here (those are all examples I’ve witnessed)
The occasion to actually shape the company we’re working in. Your interests, your passions, and your knowledge will find their place and you’ll have the possibility to make decisions on the future of Bitcraze even after the first day- my first day working here was at a quarterly meeting where we decided on a lot of things I didn’t even understood yet.
Fun Fridays, where you get to work on whatever you fancy; one day a week where productivity is not a demand and you can just get going on creating the newest prototype – and if it doesn’t work, at least you learned something!
A demo every 2 weeks, where you can actually be impressed by a blinking LED (again, true story; and it was really impressive)
Awesome colleagues that will almost never steal the stuff on your desk (unless Kristoffer labels it, which is now known as the “please borrow me” label)
Falafel Tuesdays – when you can debate which is the best falafel in town while eating the best falafel in town.
Sometimes, there is karaoke or VR games or bowling – we usually invent a pretext to enjoy some after-work together.
Daily inspiration both from the way we work but also the awesome stuff people do with our products.
The occasion to learn at least a new thing a day – wether it’s how your body reacts to sugar, how FedEx handles the taxes in Japan or what is the best way to make your Crazyflie make a loop.
While this is not Bitcraze-specific, the Swedish coast – kind of like Palm Beach without the heat (and the palms) and the general nature surrounding Malmö. Or if you don’t like nature, the possibility to enjoy a big city (Copenhagen, across the bridge) while living in a quiet area.
I hope I picked your interest, or at least gave you some insights on what it’s really like to work at Bitcraze!
It’s time for a new compilation video about how the Crazyflie is used in research ! The last one featured already a lot of awesome work, but a lot happened since then, both in research and at Bitcraze.
As usual, the hardest about making those videos is choosing the works we want to feature – if every cool video of the Crazyflie was in there, it would last for hours! So it’s just a selection of the most videogenic projects we’ve seen. You can find a more extensive list of our products used in research here.
We’ve seen a lot of projects that used the modularity of the Crazyflie to create awesome new features, like a catenary robot, some wall tracking or having it land upside down. The Crazyflie board was even made into a revolving wing drone. New sensors were used, to sniff out gas leaks (the Sniffy bug as seen in this blogpost), or to allow autonomous navigation. Swarms are also a research topic where we see a lot of the Crazyflie, this time for collision avoidance, or path planning. We also see more and more of simulators, which are used for huge swarms or physics tests.
Once again, we were surprised and awed by all the awesome things that the community did with the Crazyflie. Hopefully, this will inspire others to think of new things to do as well. We hope that we can continue with helping you to make your ideas fly, and don’t hesitate to share with us the awesome projects you’re working on!
Here is a list of all the research that has been included in the video:
2023 has already begun, and we have some ideas and hopes on what this new year will mean for Bitcraze. Of course, what 2022 has proven to us is that the world is unpredictable; but it doesn’t stop us from dreaming about our future. So here is what’s in our wishlist for 2023!
Products
We dedicated a good part of the winter to get a new, updated and better Crazyradio, that we will present to you sometime this year. Rumor around the office is that it will solve all problems you can think of, related to communication!
And, even though it’s been a long run, we hope to soon get the Big Quad deck and Bolt out of early access. There are still some things to tweak and documentation to write.
The Nimble + should arrive soon in the store, a drone with flapping wings powered by the Bolt and designed by our friends at Flapper Drones.
Prototypes
There’s always a drawer at Bitcraze that’s full of ideas and prototypes. What we lack to make them come true is time ! We are constantly wondering which of those treasures that will be our next product, and I can’t say anything is for certain, but to give you some ideas, we’ve been playing around with the idea of a brushless Crazyflie, a Glow deck, and are definitely updating some of our current decks.
Community
We really enjoyed meeting people at fairs once again after 2 years of staying put. We don’t know at which conference you will be able to catch us (yet), but we’ll most definitely attend at least 2.
And we will not loose track of our users and hope to get feedback and input as much as possible during our dev meetings or even mini-BAMs.
Bitcraze
We’re still actively looking for teammates, and we hope there’s someone out there that will join us in 2023! Send us a CV if you’re interested.
External dependencies
The components crisis hit us hard in 2020, but it seems we’re gradually coming back to normal. While the world is still full of surprises, we’re happy to have enough stability to still be doing what we like, through pandemics or recessions. Of course, we much rather prefer when things are a little less exciting! We’re cautiously optimistic about 2023, hoping that wars will end and that awareness about climate change will bring out the right habits.
Soon we will have our quarterly meeting, where we try to herd and select our passions and ideas into conceivable plans and actions.
We’re never sure if one year is enough to see all of our plans and hopes go through, but 2023 is still brand new with a lot of possibilities, that we plan to grab with passion. May this new year bring you excitement and passion too!
It’s the end of the year, and as usual, it’s time to be a little nostalgic and look back at what happened at Bitcraze during the last 12 months.
Community
2022 marked the easing out of the pandemic; and we finally got the opportunity to do onsite, physical conferences for the first time since 2020.
First, it was Kimberly alone that spend some time in the spring to visit some of our users across labs in Europe (we called it the Grand Tour). Then we visited IMAV, in the Netherlands, were we saw an amazing competition involving the AI deck. We actually also had the Crazyflie feature in an hackathon in Stockholm, in June.
But the conferences we’ve been longing for the most, and that took a good chunk of our time, was IROS and ROSCon in Japan. Preparations were intense, and for the first time, all of us were gone during one week ! Our intern Marios worked on the demo during the summer, and we presented a fully autonomous demo. We were really glad to spend time in this beautiful country to show our stuff, meeting people and discover new ways researchers use the Crazyflie.
We also had our very first Mini BAM, with Flapper Drones and CollMot. Worth of note, Mark Robber used the Crazyflie as a glitter dispenser in his latest video, in which he designed the drone to fly (without a positioning system!) from a box where it charged all the time.
Guest blog posts
And since we had more opportunities to meet our customers, we also had some interesting visits on our blog !
Kimberly created a nice simulation model for the Crazyflie, now officially available in Gazebo. We also switched to K-build. And the development of Crazyswarm2 and implementation of ROS2 took (and is still talking) some time.
Hardware
We got new motors and propellers for increased thrust , they are now available in the store! For the first time, we will also have a product made and designed by a third party, namely the Nimble + designed by Flapper Drones. I heard that the Christmas elves are working hard to get it to us soon !
A lot changed here too ! Jonas left and Arnaud took his parental leave, so with 2 men short we felt quite under staffed… That’s why we started looking for new Bitcrazers to join the team.
Thankfully, some people joined in, though temporarily. Marios worked here during the summer, and Victor joined us part time to help out too.
As usual, it’s always nice to see all the things we’ve done in the span of one year, and we’re happy with the progress we’ve made in 2022!
This year, the traditional Christmas video was overtaken by a big project that we had at the end of November: creating a test show with the help of CollMot.
First, a little context: CollMot is a show company based in Hungary that we’ve partnered with on a regular basis, having brainstorms about show drones and discussing possibilities for indoor drones shows in general. They developed Skybrush, an open- source software for controlling swarms. We have wanted to work with them for a long time.
So, when the opportunity came to rent an old train hall that we visit often (because it’s right next to our office and hosts good street food), we jumped on it. The place itself is huge, with massive pillars, pits for train maintenance, high ceiling with metal beams and a really funky industrial look. The idea was to do a technology test and try out if we could scale up the Loco positioning system to a larger space. This was also the perfect time to invite the guys at CollMot for some exploring and hacking.
The train hall
The Loco system
We added the TDoA3 Long Range mode recently and we had done experiments in our test-lab that indicate that the Loco Positioning systems should work in a bigger space with up to 20 anchors, but we had not actually tested it in a larger space.
The maximum radio range between anchors is probably up to around 40 meters in the Long Range mode, but we decided to set up a system that was only around 25×25 meters, with 9 anchors in the ceiling and 9 anchors on the floor placed in 3 by 3 matrices. The reason we did not go bigger is that the height of the space is around 7-8 meters and we did not want to end up with a system that is too wide in relation to the height, this would reduce Z accuracy. This setup gave us 4 cells of 12x12x7 meters which should be OK.
Finding a solution to get the anchors up to the 8 meters ceiling – and getting them down easily was also a headscratcher, but with some ingenuity (and meat hooks!) we managed to create a system. We only had the hall for 2 days before filming at night, and setting up the anchors on the ceiling took a big chunk out of the first day.
Drone hardware
We used 20 Crazyflie 2.1 equipped with the Loco deck, LED-rings, thrust upgrade kit and tattu 350 mAh batteries. We soldered the pin-headers to the Loco decks for better rigidity but also because it adds a bit more “height-adjust-ability” for the 350 mAh battery which is a bit thicker then the stock battery. To make the LED-ring more visible from the sides we created a diffuser that we 3D-printed in white PLA. The full assembly weighed in at 41 grams. With the LED-ring lit up almost all of the time we concluded that the show-flight should not be longer than 3-4 minutes (with some flight time margin).
The show
CollMot, on their end, designed the whole show using Skyscript and Skybrush Studio. The aim was to have relatively simple and easily changeable formations to be able to test a lot of different things, like the large area, speed, or synchronicity. They joined us on the second day to implement the choreography, and share their knowledge about drone shows.
We got some time afterwards to discuss a lot of things, and enjoy some nice beers and dinner after a job well done. We even had time on the third day, before dismantling everything, to experiment a lot more in this huge space and got some interesting data.
What did we learn?
Initially we had problems with positioning, we got outliers and lost tracking sometimes. Finally we managed to trace the problems to the outlier filter. The filter was written a long time ago and the current implementation was optimized for 8 anchors in a smaller space, which did not really work in this setup. After some tweaking the problem was solved, but we need to improve the filter for generic support of different system setups in the future.
Another problem that was observed is that the Z-estimate tends to get an offset that “sticks” and it is not corrected over time. We do not really understand this and will require more investigations.
The outlier filer was the only major problem that we had to solve, otherwise the Loco system mainly performed as expected and we are very happy with the result! The changes in the firmware is available in this, slightly hackish branch.
We also spent some time testing maximum velocities. For the horizontal velocities the Crazyflies started loosing positioning over 3 m/s. They could probably go much faster but the outlier filter started having problems at higher speeds. Also the overshoot became larger the faster we flew which most likely could be solved with better controller tuning. For the vertical velocity 3 m/s was also the maximum, limited by the deceleration when coming downwards. Some improvements can be made here.
Conclusion is that many things works really well but there are still some optimizations and improvements that could be made to make it even more robust and accurate.
The video
But, enough talking, here is the never-seen-before New Year’s Eve video
And if you’re curious to see behind the scenes
Thanks to CollMot for their presence and valuable expertise, and InDiscourse for arranging the video!
And with the final blogpost of 2022 and this amazing video, it’s time to wish you a nice New Year’s Eve and a happy beginning of 2023!
Since last March, some members of the Bitcraze team went away. Jonas left, and Arnaud took his parental leave. We welcomed an intern, and eventually Arnaud came back but our 6 person team feels a little short.
At Bitcraze, it always seems that there are not enough hours in a day to do everything we want to do. It’s even truer now, when the day-to-day maintenance is longer and it feels like we don’t have the time to dive into our new projects – even though we still manage a lot of new things, like the motor upgrade kit or a conference in Japan.
But if there is not enough man-hour per hour, one solution is simple: hire a new person ! Since this summer, a job post has been up in our webpage. We are officially actively looking for a new teammate !
So, who are we looking for exactly ?
Well, we’re looking for someone that is open, honest, and passionate about technology. That last part is easiest to determine: you must be interested in everything technological, and more specifically embedded systems. At the moment, we’re mostly looking for someone that is interested in the manufacture part of the process, but also in embedded software. However, if you’re a developer with some Python knowledge, and a passion about hardware, you’re might be a right fit as well! Generally speaking, someone with a lots of different interests that would fill the holes we have right now.
And that’s why, frankly, writing a job post is not an easy feat here. In Bitcraze, no one is the manager or “boss”, and we all decide together on what to work on. No one has a definite part, and we talk more easily of passions than fixed role . So, we don’t know exactly now what profile would be the best for us, as it’s more about what you’re willing to do than what you can accomplish. Right now, we’re in need of someone with hardware passion; but maybe we also need someone with a totally different interest that we don’t know about – because we ourselves are not interested in it and didn’t think about it.
The way we work is something that asks for a specific mindset, and we want to make sure that every prospect has the same mentality. Being open-minded, and ready to take on a lot of different tasks and roles, is a very important part of the daily life at Bitcraze, and something we’re searching for in every candidate we meet. And that covers the open and honest part !
In Japan, we came across a shrine dedicated to matchmaking. It is said that the goddess Kuchiire Inari Okami ties together people – whether for marriage or job hires. We made a small offering to her – you never know what can help.
The Kuchiire Inari Okami in Fushimi Inari
Of course, a more effective way to help us would be to send us your CV at jobs@bitcraze.io and tell us who you are !
By the way, some of us are still in Japan (while the others are recovering from jetlag) so the company might still be running a little slowly this week.
I already talked about it here and there, but this day finally came: the whole company is in Japan ! Kimberly travelled first, to account for jetlag, meet with some people, and attend ROScon.
It was last week, and she got the opportunity to learn a lot, meet people from the ROS community, and give an exciting talk.
Kimberly’s talk at RosCon (made by Ramón Roche)
Happy to be in Japan (Made by Ramón Roche)
The rest of the company travelled last week with all the equipment needed divided into our suitcases.
Our suitcases at the office, to gather the materials before going
We chose to rent a traditional machiya while there, where we can all stay together and enjoy the life in the center of Kyoto.
Us chilling out in the Bitcraze mansion
Our first day here was to account for jetlag, but we managed to sightsee the amazing sites of Kyoto – and enjoy the most praised Japanese food, much appreciated after a long walk among the Tori gates of the Fushimi Inari shrine.
Us after climbing on top of Mt Inari – with the beautiful path of Tori gates
But it was soon time to start working, and yesterday we worked really hard on setting up everything to have a nice demo at IROS.
After some head scratching, emergency taping and hacking we managed to get the autonomous demo that Marios implemented last summer flying – just before the event hall We got time to explore the Kyoto International Conference Center, a beautiful venue with a Japanese garden and a futuristic look – as imagined in the 70′.
Some views from the Kyoto Conference Center
We invited those of you that are attending IROS to come and see us for a tech meet-up. It’s today and it would be a real nice opportunity for us to finally chat in person with our users ! Since there are a lot of aerial systems talks, we realize it may be difficult to come during the sessions, so the tech meet-up can begin during the break, at 15.40
Next up this week is the safe nanocopter competition. Kimberly will actually deliver the prize for that, we can’t wait to see what this competition will show – and how fun it is to remote-control the Crazyflies that are in the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies!
Of course, we will share some news on social media – and we will have a blogpost in a few weeks to debrief on the whole trip.
As you’ll understand, maintaining the day-to-day of the company is a little trickier this week, but we still monitor email, github discussions, and are shipping orders. You should just expect a longer time to process those, as we’re too busy – either at the booth or… at karaoke ! (no, there will be no videos of us singing).
This fall is full of exciting events for us, and none are more excitedly expected than our visit to Japan. Yes, the whole company (6 people) are travelling to Kyoto for at least a week – but not for sightseeing (well, not only). Here is what we have planned:
ROSCon
As per tradition, ROSCon is held shortly before IROS. So, on the 19 to 21 October, Kimberly will be here to represent us along the ROS community. She will even have a presentation about the latest ROS2 integrations in collaboration with the maintainers of Crazyswarm2. It’s on October 21st, 16.50 local time so if you’re there make sure to hear her talk !
IROS
From the 21st to the 27th of October, IROS will be held at the Kyoto International Conference Center. it’s one of largest robotics conference worldwide, with almost 1750 papers presented. As the first in-person session of the conference since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, we had to be there. We will man the booth during the whole conference, with the demo our intern Marios has worked on a lot. And since it’s been a long time since we’ve been able to gather and talk together, we thought it would be great to have an official meetup at IROS for those interested.
So, please note this official invitation to Bitcraze’s tech meetup at IROS! If you’re at IROS and want to meet us together with other Crazyflie users, then let’s get together on Monday 24th of October at 16.00 at our booth 59. It’s the perfect occasion to (re)connect, to get the latest news about Bitcraze, to talk about development, share what you’ve been doing and even possibly hack together! Be sure to say hi if you’re there. We will try to make it something similar to a Swedish fika, with some sweets and coffee, but we can’t promise that there will be kanelbullar.
IROS Safe Robot Learning Competition
And this year, we’re happy to announce that there will be a Crazyflie competition during IROS. The goal is to develop safe learning-based algorithms that can cope with uncertainties not known at design time. Our friends at Dynamic Systems Lab are organizing this competition with two simulated phase, and one experimental phase at IROS… And the experiment is a remote access to the Flight Arena at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in Toronto, Canada via high-speed internet connections. You don’t need to be present at IROS to participate, but if you wish to do so, beware, the registration for the competition ends on October 12th. We’re really curious and excited to see what this competition is going to show!
What about Bitcraze during that week?
But, if everybody is in Japan, what about Bitcraze’s regular activities ? You may be wondering. Well, no worries. Even though we’re going to be half a world away, the business is going to follow us. Of course, some of us are going to take that opportunity to take some vacations and visit this beautiful country, so during IROS’ week and the week after, the company will run a little bit more slowly than usual. We won’t be as reactive as usual on emails and discussions, but we will still monitor our emails and ship some orders.
Are you planning to visit IROS or ROSCon ? Is there anything in particular in the schedule that you don’t want to miss ? Don’t hesitate to tell us if you want to join the meetup !
We’re now in the middle of summer, and even though we’re not affected by the heat much here in Sweden, we’re still in a slower pace as usual, since a lot of us are not at the office. Sales, packing, support and general maintenance takes up a lot of our time for those that are left at the office. We also usually take the summer time to clear out lingering issues and focus on some projects that we can tackle alone.
This summer though will be mostly used for preparation of a very busy autumn. As the Covid situation seems to normalize around the world, conferences onsite are restarting, and we plan to take advantage of this ! Here is what is planned:
IMAV – Delft, 12 to 16 September.
The 13th edition of the International Micro Air Vehicle Conference will be held in Delft, in the Netherlands. We’ve been collaborating for a long time with the MAVLab in Delft, so we’re really happy to be one of the sponsors for this conference. For the occasion, there is a nano AI competition that we’re really excited to see. With the AI bundle, the goal is to fly as fast as possible through an obstacle course.
We’ve been working a lot with the AI deck this past year, so this competition is the perfect occasion for us to see it in action. Kimberly has also developed a simulator that will be used for this competition.
ROSCon – Kyoto, 19 to 21 october
ROSCon is a conference dedicated to the entire ROS community, traditionally held right before IROS. Kimberly will be our proud represent there, as she will have a talk about ROS2 and the Crazyflie. For the occasion, she will showcase the latest ROS2 integrations in collaboration with the maintainers of Crazyswarm2.
Last time a Crazyflie was present at ROSCon was in 2015, where Wolfgang Hönig had a lightning talk. A lot has changed since that time, and we’re hoping to increase the presence of (tiny) aerial vehicles within the ROS community, especially nanocopters like the Crazyflie.
IROS – Kyoto, 23 to 27 october
IROS is one of the largest robotics conferences worldwide, and after an online edition last year, this 35th instance promises to be full of exciting things!
As it’s quite huge, and for a quite delayed 10th Bitcraze’s anniversary, the whole company plans to get to this conference. Not only for the chance to discover Japan, that most of us haven’t visited, but also because it feels important to have a significant presence in this conference, which promises a lot of opportunities. That would mean a week without anyone at the Swedish office, but you know where to find us if you would like to talk to us ;).
For the occasion, our intern Marios is working on revamping the autonomous swarm demo. Because of the pandemic, it’s been a while since we actually used it for a whole day of flying, and he’s actively working on making it completely autonomous by implementing the peer to peer protocol.
Logistics
As you can see, those exciting 3 conferences almost back-to-back promise a busy autumn here at Bitcraze. There’s a lot to prepare ahead of time, like marketing materials, demo setups, visas problems and hotel bookings. And there will be a lot to talk about, during and after. The pandemics have delayed a lot of our in-person meetings, and it will feel really good to finally get to meet up in the real world with users – old and new. If you have the opportunity, don’t hesitate to come by our booths on those conferences and say hello in person!
