Before we start settling down and preparing for Christmas, it’s time for another release! The last one was before the summer in July, and we’ve had quite a few changes on the development master branch that we’d like to share. You can now download the latest Cfclient through pip and install the newest firmware on the Crazyflie to 2023.11 via the CFclient.
Latest changes in CFclient and Cflib
The most significant change in the CFclient is that we have finally transitioned from QT5 to QT6 for the GUI graphics. Additionally, we have addressed some issues with the toolboxes. Finally, we have added an information box to indicate the state of the supervisor, such as whether the Crazyflie is considered tumbled, flying, or if a restart is required because it is locked.
Cfclient when the crazyflie is tumbled with supervisor info
For the backend, namely the Crazyflie Python library, some important changes have been implemented. Along with fixes to the parameter and logging framework, full-state setpoints have been introduced. This feature has existed in firmware for a while due to the Crazyswarm1 project (now Crazyswarm2), but it wasn’t implemented in the cflib until now. Additionally, it’s now necessary to use `notify_setpoint_stop` in cases of switching between high-level setpoints and regular position setpoints. There is also a generic motion capture example now based on the libmotioncapture library.
Note that even though the CFclient has been converted to QT6, there are several examples in the Cflib folder that have not been updated yet. This will be fixed soon, and a ticket has been created for it. Additionally, in the Bitcraze-VM, there have been some reported issues with QT6 (see this ticket).
Latest changes in the firmware
The firmware has undergone some important changes too. On the STM side of things, the hybrid TDOA mode has been merged (check out this recent blog post). This feature is still considered experimental, so please refer to the documentation for the right settings. Additionally, support for the supervisor information box in the CFclient has been added. To utilize it, both the firmware and CFclient need to be updated. There is also a new example demonstrating communication between gap8 and cpx. Last but not least, it is now possible to create Python bindings for portions of the Kalman filter, mainly for the Loco positioning system. On the other hand, the NRF firmware has no added functionalities except for some build changes and fixes.
Crazyradio2 + LPS tools
We’ve also made some improvements in other firmware or tools. Starting with the Crazyradio2, which includes fixes for broadcasting (important for you Crazyswarm2 folks!). We also aimed to make a new release of LPS tools since we heard that people were experiencing issues with USB devices. Unfortunately, there are some problems with the GitHub release actions, so that will likely be delayed. For anyone facing USB issues, you can install the LPS tools from source with Python following the ReadMe’s instructions.
As we already announced last week in the Monday blog post, we will be having a developer meeting this Wednesday (6th Dec, 3 pm CET) regarding the Flow deck (refer to this discussion thread for joining information). Since we usually don’t fill up the entire hour, the last part of the developer meeting is available for some generic support questions face-to-face (online), including questions about the release!
The Flow deck has been around for some time already, officially released in 2017 (see this blog post), and the Flow deck v2 was released in 2018 with an improved range sensor. Compared to MoCap positioning and the Loco Positioning System (based on Ultrawideband) that were already possible before, optical flow-based positioning for the Crazyflie opened up many more possibilities. Flight was no longer confined to lab environments with set-up external systems; people could bring the Crazyflie home and do their hacking there. Moreover, doing research for exploration techniques that cannot rely on external positioning systems was possible with it as well. For example, back in my day as a PhD student, I relied heavily on the Flow deck for multi-Crazyflie autonomous exploration. This would have been very difficult without it.
However, despite the numerous benefits that the Flow deck provides, there are also several limitations. These limitations may not be immediately familiar to many before purchasing a Crazyflie with a Flow deck. A while ago, we wrote a blog post about positioning systems in general and even delved into the Loco Positioning System in detail. In this blog post, we will explore the theory of how the Flow deck enables the Crazyflie to fly, share general tips and tricks for ensuring stable flight, and highlight what to avoid. Moreover, we aim to make the Flow deck the focus of next week’s Developer meeting, with the goal of improving or clarifying its performance further.
Theory of the Flow deck
I won’t delve into too much detail but will provide a generic indication of how the Flow deck works. As previously explained in the positioning system blog post, the Flow deck is a relative positioning system with onboard estimation. “Relative” means that wherever you start is the (0, 0, 0) position. The extended Kalman filter processes flow and height information to determine velocity, which is then integrated to estimate the position—essentially dead reckoning. The onboard Kalman filter manages this process, enabling the Crazyflie to use the information for stable hovering.
The optical flow sensor (PMW3901) calculates pixel flow per frame (this old blog post explains it well), and the IR range sensor (VL53L1x) measures height up to 4 meters (under ideal conditions). The Kalman filter incorporates a measurement model that describes the relationship between these two values and the velocity of the Crazyflie. More detailed information can be found in the state estimation documentation. This capability allows the Crazyflie to hover, as explained in the getting started tutorial.
If you want to fly with the Crazyflie and the Flow deck, there are a couple of things to take in mind:
Take off from a floor with texture. Natural texture like wood flooring is probably the best.
The floor shouldn’t be too shiny, and be aware of infrared scattering for the height sensor
The room should be well-lit, as the sensor needs to see the texture.
There are certain situations that the Flow deck has some issues with:
Low or no texture. Flying above something that is only one plain color
Black areas. Similar reason to flying above no texture, but it’s more difficult than usual. Especially with startup, the position estimate diverges
Low light conditions
Flying over its own shadow
We made a video that shows these types of behaviors, starting of course with the most ideal flying conditions:
Moreover, it is also important to note that you shouldn’t fly too high or yaw too often. The latter will make the Crazyflie drift, as the optical flow cannot be distinguished as being caused by the yaw movement.
Developer meeting about Flow deck
We believe that many of the issues people experience are primarily due to the invisibility of the positioning quality. In many of our examples, the Crazyflie will not take off if the position is stable. However, we don’t have a corresponding functionality in our CFclient, as it is more up to the user to recognize when the positioning is diverging. There is a lot of room for improvement in this regard.
This is the reason why the next developer meeting will specifically focus on the Flow deck, which will be on Wednesday the 6th of December, 3 pm central European time. During the meeting, we will explain more about the Flow deck, discuss the issues we are facing, and explore ways to enhance the visibility of positioning quality. Check out this discussion thread for information on how to join.
It seems that many of you are very interested in simulation. We might have gotten the hint when we noticed that our July’s development meeting had our best attendance so far! Therefore, we will be planning a new developer meeting to discuss the upcoming plans for supporting simulation for the Crazyflie.
Getting Started with Simulation tutorial
Perhaps you are not aware, but there is actually a Getting Started tutorial for simulation that has been available for a little over 2 months now. Unfortunately, circumstances prevented us from writing a blog post about it, but we’ve noticed that not all of you are aware of it yet!
The getting-started tutorial demonstrates how to set up the Webots simulator, which already includes Crazyflie models and some cool examples:
An example that you can control the Crazyflie with the keyboard
An example that the Crazyflie does wall following autonomously
The tutorial concludes with instructions on how to edit these controllers. Alternatively, you can choose to run the files directly from the crazyflie-simulation repository. After completing the tutorial, you can explore the simulation repository documentation for more information and to access additional examples.
Upcoming plans
With so many plans and so little time! This is a common phrase at Bitcraze, and it’s a symptom of being an overly ambitious, but too small, team. By the way, we are still looking for more people :). Nonetheless, we have big plans to take our Crazyflie simulation to the next level:
ROS 2 Crazyflie model for Webots: The Crazyflie has been a part of the Webots standard robots for 2 years now, but we still need to implement the Crazyflie into the Webots ROS 2 repository.
Better (new) Gazebo support: Currently, we only have a very simple example for Gazebo, which is limited to motors with no control input. Working with the C++ API can be a bit challenging, so it might be worth considering the use of ROS 2 in the loop here. Let’s see what comes out of it.
Integration into Crazyswarm2: Once the Webots ROS2 node has been released, integrating the Crazyflie simulation into Crazyswarm2 will become more straightforward.
Improvement to the Python bindings: We’ve had Python bindings for controllers and the high-level commander for a while. Recently, we also added Python bindings for the estimator (currently for loco positioning only). However, there are still some issues to address with the Python bindings for the controllers due to timing issues with the simulators.
Linking with our CFLIB: Currently, both Webots and the Crazyflie Python library use entirely different APIs. This means that these scripts are not compatible and you’ll need to be creative not to reuse new code. However, wouldn’t it be nice to use a python example from the python library with a --sim and that it would actually control the Crazyflie in the simulator instead?
Of course, there are probably more improvements that we haven’t thought of yet, but that’s why we have developer meetings!
Come and join us at the Developer meeting.
We will be hosting another developer meeting on November 1st at 15:00 Central European Time (accounting for the time-shift from summer to autumn). You can find details on how to join in the discussion thread here.
Just for your information, I (Kimberly) am the main driving force behind our simulation efforts. However, I’m currently on partial sick leave and will soon be on full leave for a while. I kindly ask for your patience with the pace of ongoing developments. Remember, it’s an open-source project, so if you’d like to contribute and help out, we would greatly appreciate it :)
We talked about it before the summer, and it’s finally here! The 350 mAh battery is now available in our shop. It implies some changes in the products we offer, so here is a breakdown of what’s new:
It is more powerful than the 250 mAh battery that comes with your Crazyflie. We based it on the Tattu 350mAh 3.7V 30C 1S1P but with some custom works like gold connectors, tailored wire length, and awesome Bitcraze graphics on it. On top of the added power, the upgrade has higher capabilities, (30C burst current, which is more than 10 Amp) and higher energy density (~130 Wh/kg instead of ~105 Wh/kg). It all means that this could boost your hover time up to 10 minutes, and you’ll have more punch during acceleration! It is, though, more expansive than the 250 mAh.
The pin headers
The 350 mAh is thicker than the stock battery, which means you would need longer pin headers in order to snug it onto your Crazyflie. For that, there are now 9mm pin headers available in the shop. This means that now, you can get 3 different male connectors:
the 8+14mm is the one that comes with your Crazyflie kit. It’s meant to be phased out at some point. It allows to fit 1 or 2 decks and the 250 mAh battery.
the 9+15mm is slightly longer and is available in the shop – both as a spare part and in the upgraded battery bundle. It allows to fit 1 or 2 decks and the 350 mAh battery.
the male long connector: the longest pin of all, it’s the one that allows you to fit 3 decks.
Since it makes more sense to have slightly longer pins, the male connectors as spare parts are now slightly longer ones than those you get in your Crazyflie kit.
If you’re not sure, you can always buy the upgraded battery bundle that offers the 350 mAh battery with the right pin headers.
Bundles
The 350 mAh battery is much more suited for swarms than the 250 mAh, that’s why we’re planning on having an upgraded offer for our swarm bundles. In the coming week, both the Lighthouse and the Loco Swarms will be fitted for the updated offer. That would mean that it will include the new batteries with the right pin headers as well – there will be a slight price increase to match the price of the batteries.
Bare PCB
But that’s not the only surprise waiting for you in the shop: you can now also buy a spare Crazyflie PCB! We thought it would be good to have this option in the store – in case you have crashed too many times and you only just need the PCB!
Right now, it may seem a little confusing, between our different propellers, batteries, or pin headers. It’s mainly because we are trying to, slowly, build up a better, upgraded offer – which will, eventually, culminate in an upgraded Crazyflie 2.1, where the 47-17 propellers and the 9mm pin headers are standards. We’re also planning to publish a guide to help you quickly figure out what would best suit your needs!
Today, Suryansh Sharma from TU Delft presents the open-source Gimbal they devised. Enjoy!
Crazyflies (and other drones in this weight class) are extremely fun to fly and prototype with! But if you are also a scientist or tinkerer and not a well-skilled drone pilot then you might struggle with flying these platforms especially when testing new control loops or experimental code. While crashing also teaches a lot about the behavior of the system, sometimes we are interested in seeing the system dynamics without breaking the drone.
Currently, doing this for such small drones is not easy. We need something lightweight and still accessible. To solve this, we made Open Gimbal: a specially designed 3 degrees of freedom (DoF) platform that caters to the unique requirements of these tiny drones. We make two versions, (a) Tripod version which can be mounted on a camera / light tripod with a screw thread of sizes 1/4-20 UNC or 3/8-16 UNC (b) Desktop version which can be placed on a table top.
Tripod VersionDesktop VersionCAD models of the different Open Gimbal versions you can 3D print and use.
Our approach focuses on simplicity and accessibility. We developed an open-source, 3-D printable electro-mechanical design that has minimal size and low complexity. This design facilitates easy replication and customization, making it widely accessible to researchers and developers. The platform allows for unrestricted and free rotational motion, enabling comprehensive experimentation and evaluation. You can see the movement from the CAD version below:
Degrees of Rotational freedom that Open Gimbal provides
You can also check out the interactive CAD model and see how the gimbal moves here. All of the 3D model files as well as the BOM and instructions for assembly can be found in our repository here.
In our publication, we also address the challenges of sensing flight dynamics at a small scale. To do so, we have devised an integrated wireless batteryless sensor subsystem. Our innovative solution eliminates the need for complex wiring and instead uses wireless power transfer for sensor data reception. You can read all about how we do this in our paper here.
If you do end up using the platform for research then you can cite us using the details below:
@ARTICLE{10225720, author={Sharma, Suryansh and Dijkstra, Tristan and Prasad, Ranga Venkatesha}, journal={IEEE Sensors Letters}, title={Open Gimbal: A 3 Degrees of Freedom Open Source Sensing and Testing Platform for Nano- and Micro-UAVs}, year={2023}, volume={7}, number={9}, pages={1-4}, doi={10.1109/LSENS.2023.3307121}}
Open Gimbal at European Robotics Forum 2023 in DenmarkOpen Gimbal in use at Prof. Leszek’s lab in PolandOpen Gimbal at TU Delft, NetherlandsOpen Gimbals with Crazyflies mounted in the wild!
I hope that you find the Open Gimbal useful! Feel free to reach out to me at Suryansh.Sharma@tudelft.nl if you have any ideas/questions or if you end up making an Open Gimbal yourself!
After a nice (but rainy) summer, everyone is back at the office and we’re coming back to business as usual at Bitcraze. This blog post is dedicated to various bits of news, in order to get you caught up on what’s been happening during the summer.
Dev meeting theme
There were no dev meetings in August to allow everyone to rest and enjoy their vacations, but after this hiatus, we’re back in the saddle! The dev meeting will happen, as usual, on the first Wednesday of the month, so the 6th of September, at 15.00 CEST.
This month, Arnaud is going to talk about the lib: what is its current status, its architecture, and some hopes we have for the future. As usual, we’ll have a short presentation, and then a discussion; you can also join if you have more general questions or feedback. If you’re interested and willing to take part in this discussion, you can check the information on Github: https://github.com/orgs/bitcraze/discussions/884
Chargers out of stock
Some items were out of stock during the summer (like the HQ propellers) that we thankfully received soon after we came back. Unfortunately, one product is still not available: the battery charger. Since it’s part of the Swarm bundles, it also means that the bundles are out of stock too. But the wait for their restocking shouldn’t be too long, as they are scheduled to arrive around the end of next week. We’re hoping it’s not a big inconvenience for you and we thank you for your patience!
Problems with payment
We’ve noticed that some of you had some problems getting their payment through in our shop. If you’re one of the unlucky ones who faced this issue, we apologize for the inconvenience, and we want you to know we’re working with our payment provider to figure out a solution. This, unfortunately, can take some time because of the number of parties involved (there’s us, the payment provider, different banks, so the situation gets quite complex quickly). In the meantime, if you should encounter such a problem, don’t hesitate to send us an email at contact@bitcraze.se and we can help out. It would also help us to know who is facing this issue.
As of this year around March/April we started with both Bitcraze developer meetings and Aerial-ROS meetings (the latter in collaboration with Dronecode Foundation). Now that summer is around and our office is a bit empty, we had a bit of a summer break, however we will start the meetings back up again soon! The next ROS-aerial meeting will be on the 16th of August and we will also have a Bitcraze developer meeting planned on the Wednesday the 6th of September (keep an eye on our announcements in discussions). In this blogpost we like to take the opportunity to show an overview of the meetings we had so far.
Aerial ROS meetings
In March we started a [ROS community working group] for aerial Vehicles together with our friends at Dronecode foundation, aka Aerial-ROS! We have biweekly meetings with some standard discussion meetings (with a topic) and with an invited guest presentation.
We already had a couple of developer meetings before but we started recording them since April. The first recorded one was about the loco positioning system. Here first we gave a presentation about the system itself, with the latest developments cooking in our pot and time for questions afterwards.
Dev meeting about Loco positioning.
Then we had a meeting about the development of safety features in the Crazyflie in light of the Bolt developments:
Bitcraze Dev meeting about Safety features.
Then we had a meeting where Kristoffer highlighted the autonomous swarm demo we showed at ICRA 2023.
Bitcraze dev meeting about the autonomous swarm demo
And the last before the summer holiday, we had a meeting where Kimberly explained about the Crazyflie simulationmodel intergrated into Webots
Bitcraze Dev meeting about Simulation
We are still planning to have developer meeting every first wednesday of the month starting with September 6th (keep an eye on our announcements in discussions).
EPFL 101 Crazyflie presentation
Oh yeah, by the way, we also were invited by the EPFL-lis lab to give another Crazyflie 101 presentation in Lausanne last April! We made a prerecording of it so you can check it out right here:
Today, Lennart Bult from Emergent Swarns presents us with this project of a 24/7 swarming demo. Enjoy!
Over the last few months our team has been working on creating a 24/7 swarming demo. Initially tasked by Guido de Croon and Chris Verhoeven from TU Delft MAVLab and the TU Delft Robotics Institute, we set out to find our way within the Crazyflie ecosystem to gradually increase the size and capabilities of the swarm. In this article we will first talk about some of the work and methods that we used. After that, we will introduce the TU Delft Science Centre Swarming Lab and talk about some applications of swarming drones.
Developing the 24/7 swarm
The project started in February with the goal of creating a physical swarm capable of real-time collision avoidance with drones and static obstacles. We started out with three drones equipped with the Flow Deck, and by setting them up in a clever way we could perform the first collision avoidance and landing tests. We were impressed with the performance we got out of the Flow Deck, however, eventually, it is mostly a battle against the drift of the position estimate, that is, we could increase some of the margins on the collision avoidance only so far before we would either fly out of the test zone or collide with another drone. Luckily with short test flights, we were able to see some of the flaws in our algorithms and correct them before testing with the new setup.
Setup after the first expansion to eight drones.
After a few weeks of testing we got approved for the first swarm expansion, five more drones and a Lighthouse positioning setup. This is when we could do our first real tests with the collision avoidance algorithm, which, much to our own surprise, worked on the first try. This is also when we first posted a project update on LinkedIn. There were however a lot of bugs that still needed to be worked out, and a lot of system experience still to be gained. After flying for a bit longer we noticed that some of the drones would flip quite often, which is when we discovered that we needed the thrust upgrade to control the additional weight of the larger battery and charging deck.
For the charging setup we took inspiration from the Bitcraze IROS 2022 demo; we 3D printed sloped landing pads that we tape onto a wireless charger. After a few iterations we landed on a design that uses minimal printer resources and allows the Crazyflie to land a bit off-center. This last feature turned out to be quite useful considering the large amount of destabilizing airflow that is generated by 40 drones. After receiving the last order of drones we also expanded the charging setup, which at this point takes up quite a bit of floor space. There are some ideas to create a vertical landing pad stack, which would bring the additional challenge of missing the landing pad not being an option.
All 40 drones recharging before their next flight.
After prototyping the charging setup and building confidence with the initial setup, we were confident enough in our system capabilities to expand it to the point where a continuous demo of 5-8 drones is possible. Although the system integration of the previous expansion went without much trouble, we did encounter a few issues when expanding to 40 drones. The first issue of which was radio communication, we noticed that a delay in the radio communication would be present if we increased the update rate above a certain level for a specific number of drones per radio. The second issue we encountered were performance drops related to the violation of certain bounds in the collision avoidance algorithm. These two issues were very difficult to debug since it was not immediately obvious where the source of the issue was.
The third and last major issue was the increase in destabilizing airflow of 40 drones compared to 8. With 40 drones there is a noticeable breeze when you stand next to the drone cage, which is nice for summertime, but not so nice when drones need to land in a tight-packed configuration. To combat this issue there is a limit to the amount of drones that can land at the same time. There is also a minimum separation distance between two active landing pads, which reduced the severity of the induced turbulence. There are still ongoing efforts to increase the landing success rate, which is currently affected by drones running out of power during the landing procedure.
To control and monitor the swarm we designed a custom GUI, an impression of which you can see below. Although some of the buttons are still a work in progress, there are a lot of features that have already proven very useful, especially when testing a new feature.
V1 of the graphical user interface developed for the 24/7 swarm.
The code base that we created for the swarm will be largely open-sourced (only the collision avoidance will not be open-source) to provide researchers all around the world with the possibility to setup their own Crazyflie swarm for research. You can find the repository through this link. Note that the documentation and code base are still under development and might contain bugs/errors.
Human interaction
After creating all functionality to provide a continuously operating swarm demo, it was time to work on some of our stretch goals: 1. walking through the swarm whilst it is operating and 2. controlling the swarm using our arms. In the image below you can see an impression of precisely this functionality. The drones are following the operator’s gesture commands whilst performing live collision avoidance with an operator.
Team member Seppe directing the 40 drone swarm, see the full video here.
This demo requires multiple techniques and hardware elements working together to create a relatively low-latency, human-controlled swarm. We used a Kinect-like 3D sensor to perform human pose estimation, we subsequently used this data to create a dynamic obstacle in our collision avoidance software. An important element to consider here is the synchronization of the Lighthouse- and 3D sensor coordinate frames, i.e. without proper calibration the human will not be correctly positioned with respect to the drones and the drones will crash into the human. The interaction between the swarm control software and the human gesture commands also requires careful consideration, proper tuning is required to ensure a responsive system that is reliable and not too aggressive.
TUD Science Centre Swarming Lab
The next step in this project will be to set up the swarm at its new location, the TU Delft Science Centre. Here, the swarm will first and foremost be visible as a public demo, showcasing the capabilities of TU Delft state-of-the-art swarming research. There will also be a focus on developing the swarm as a research platform. This will allow TU Delft students and researchers to extend swarm functionalities and test their theory on a physical swarming system. Besides demos and academic research, there will also be worked on developing educational applications across the full educational board (primary school, high school and applied education). If you are interested in working on, or collaborating with the swarming lab on any of the above-mentioned tasks, feel free to email the lab management at operations.swarminglab@tudelft.nl.
The TU Delft Swarming Lab setup with 40 drones and charging pads for continuous operations and research.
Applications of Swarming
There are a lot of potential use-cases for fully autonomous drone swarms, ranging from indoor applications such as warehouse monitoring and factory inspection to outdoor applications such as search and rescue and surveillance. In our opinion, the true potential of drone swarms lies in applications where there is a significant need for a scalable system with a lot of built-in redundancy. A lot of additional use cases open up when we consider fully onboard autonomous systems, where the full benefits of decentralized swarming can be utilized. Currently, the size of drones needed to achieve such feats is quite large, though maybe in a few years, we could see more and more being done on drone platforms such as the Crazyflie.
A swarm inspection of an F-16 Fighting Falcon at Deltion College in Zwolle, the Netherlands.
An interesting area of application for drone swarms could be in the inspection of aircraft. Drone swarms provide a scalable and flexible means to perform a fast inspection of aircraft across an entire airfield or military base. To showcase that this can be done with any size of drone, we went to Deltion College in Zwolle to perform a mock inspection of an F-16 fighter jet. Above you can see an impression of the inspection. Another area of application is search and rescue, where there is a need for systems that can find people or objects of interest in unknown and cluttered environments. Furthermore, the area that needs to be searched is usually very large and sometimes difficult to travel on foot. A drone swarm could provide fast and reliable coverage of the area of interest, whilst providing full data traceability. Seppe and Lennart will work on creating drone swarms for these use cases with the start-up Emergent Swarms.
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!
We are excited to announce that we will be having developer meetings on first Wednesdays of every month! Additionally, we are thrilled to be present in person at ICRA 2023 in London. During the same conference, there will be half day workshop called ‘The Role of Robotics Simulators for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles’ so make sure to sign-up! Please check out our newly updated event-page !
Monthly Developer meetings
We have had some online developer meetings in the past covering various topics. While these meetings may not have been the most popular, we believe it is crucial to maintain communication with the community and have interesting discussions, and exchange of ideas. However, we used to plan them ad-hoc and we had no regularity in them, which sometimes caused some of us **cough** especially me **cough**, to create confusion about the timing and location. To remove these factors of templexia (dyslexia for time), we will just have it simply on the first Wednesday of every month.
So our first one with be on Wednesday 5th of April at 15:00 CEST and the information about the particular developer meeting will be as usual on discussions. From 15:00 – 15:30 it will be a general discussion, probably with a short presentation, about a topic to be determined. From 15:30-16:00 will address regular support question from anybody that need help with their work on the Crazyflie.
ICRA 2023 London
ICRA will be held in London this year, from May 29 – June 2nd, atthe ExCel venue. We will be located in the H11 booth in the exhibitor hall, but as the date approaches, we will share more about what awesome prototypes we will showcase and what we will demonstrate on-site. Rest assured, plenty of Crazyflies will be flown in the cage! To get an idea of what we demo-ed last year it IROS Kyoto, please check out the IROS 2022 event page. Matej from Flapper Drones will join us at our booth to showcase the Flapper drone.
We are thinking of organizing a meetup for participants on the Wednesday after the Conference Dinner, so we will share the details of that in the near future as well. Also keep an eye on our ICRA 2023 event page for updated information.
Additionally, participants can submit an extended abstract to be invited for an poster presentation during the same workshop. The submission deadline has been extended to April 3rd, so for more information about submission, schedule and speaker info, go to the workshop’s website.
