I’m building a flying robot.

More specifically, a friend and I are building an electric quadrocopter which flies autonomously by using the accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS on a smart phone to tell some artificial intelligence algorithms where the robot is and how to go where it wants to go. The robot will also be trained in image recognition, so that it can autonomously follow certain things, like riot cops at a protest, and upload a live video feed to the interwebs. That last bit is something I’m not really sure about yet, because I’m used to working with linguistic neural networks, and intelligent routing algorithms are something I’ve only just wet my toes in. But I think I can manage it, and it’s going to be super useful because the image recognition software could be used to find all kinds of things, like lost hikers, or injured people in trapped in rubble.

I’m going to open-source everything I write for this except the image recognition stuff. I don’t want to hand the world’s governments a better way to monitor protesters. And the former already have a head start on using technology like this to hurt people.

So far the set up for programming is an android phone, purchased bricked, then unbricked because doing it that way isn’t very hard and it immediately saves nearly two hundred dollars. It needs to be one of the phones from this list, because those have gyroscopes. However, some of those may not allow USB to serial communication, which is also necessary. I’m just going to start trying phones and when I find a model which works I’ll report back. The phone will also need to have Android Scripting Environment with Python For Android installed, and support USB host mode.

Next, the ML and the flight control programs on the phone will need to pass arguments to the arduino through serial communications. Here’s a little python program to do that, and it’s ultra-beta at this point, so don’t freak out on me if it doesn’t work yet.

Then, that phone is directly wired to the Arduino. The phone will also use Amarino, which is an API for communications between Arduino and Android. I think. Amarino uses bluetooth, and I’m not okay with a flying robot having anything bluetooth enabled on it due to the potential security vulnerabilities of using bluetooth exploits to gain control of the robot. So there’s the possibilty that I’ll have to modify Amarino.

Here’s a parts list for the robot. And here’s my notes thus far. Code will be up shortly.

Here’s some pictures to entertain you while you wait!

Also, I’d like to add that, though I have recently been accused by several people of getting into hardware hacking, this is not the case. Sure, this is fun. Alright, I’m learning things, and I like soldering (mainly …

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