The Joy of Flying AR Drones with Clojure

It's not clojure, but this is fun: <a href="https://github.com/andrew/quadcopter-presentation" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/andrew/quadcopter-presentation</a><p><pre><code> Quadcopter Presentation An automated ignite style presentation that sends commands to a connected Parrot AR Drone via socket.io direct from the browser. setup and run https://github.com/bkw/node-dronestream on port 3000 at the same time and you'll get a video stream from the drone in slide 15 </code></pre> And here's a simulated AR.Drone for voxeljs: <a href="https://github.com/shama/voxel-drone" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/shama/voxel-drone</a><p>My voice controlled AR.Drone: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhBa11gdbeU" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhBa11gdbeU</a>

This is great I've been looking for an excuse to learn Clojure and I have access to the same model drone.<p>As an aside this talk is amazing, even more so if you've had any exposure to control theory.<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4IJXAVXgIo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4IJXAVXgIo</a><p>(if you get bored the best bit is at 20min)

I knew the AR Drone sounded familiar. When I first saw it, I was concerned about the only flying controls being a mobile device (and not a traditional remote). That said, it looks like a ton of fun and the extensibility options are endless.<p>Still, my personal preference would be a standard quadcopter or plane with an APM [1]. If only I can free up some spending money...<p>[1] <a href="http://store.diydrones.com/APM_2_5_Not_Assembled_p/br-apmpwrkt2.htm" rel="nofollow">http://store.diydrones.com/APM_2_5_Not_Assembled_p/br-apmpwr...</a>

I kept procrastinating on working on AR-Drone because I didn’t want to do it in JavaScript. This is great.

This is so awesome. A handful of other Stanford students and I entered a Node+AR Drone hackathon in SF[1] a while back and we had a blast.<p>We had so much fun, in fact, that we integrated AR Drone hacking into the Robotics Club. This started as a few friends messing with 2 drones and its grown to the point where I'm actually teaching NodeJS, Javascript+Coffeescript, a bit of Unix, and various algorithms to 35+ students fresh out of Stanford's <i>Intro</i> to Computer Science course! (Its still mostly the basics, but I've been writing up &#38; posting lesson info here <a href="http://drones.johnback.us/" rel="nofollow">http://drones.johnback.us/</a>).<p>I'm <i>very excited</i> with what the various AR Drone communities have created so far. The popular Node library[2], a Go implementation (in progress) by the same author[3], and this Clojure option[4] are all amazing avenues for teaching interesting CS languages (that remain largely ignored in formal academics) to students new to CS.<p>[1] <a href="http://dronegames.co/" rel="nofollow">http://dronegames.co/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/felixge/ardrone" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/felixge/ardrone</a><p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/gigasquid/clj-drone" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gigasquid/clj-drone</a>

The AR Drone (v1) I had was great and I miss it everyday. I hope they worked out the major kinks in the v2 revision. I ended up returning mine not by choice. I sent it back to the store because the motherboard failed and they sent me store credit instead. I guess too many failures and too many returns made them get out the drone selling business.<p>The SDK was fairly well equipped and the examples were well documented (this was iOS 3, GB, and C# examples). I don't know how they did it but they have the starter ready-to-run drone market to themselves. All the competitors I've looked at are 2-3x the price. Even the link the above is $179 just for the MB; excluding sensors, motors, batteries, cameras, and crossframe.

It does look fun.<p>But the programming done here is very imperative and procedural in nature. Not to say it can't or shouldn't be done. It just doesn't seem like a very good case for using a functional programming language, although the title seems to imply that. Anybody attempting to learn Clojure this way is probably missing out on the actual merits of functional programming.

I had never really looked at Clojure before this post and when I saw the code I almost vomited in my mouth from how ugly it is. Then I thought "that can't be what Clojure looks like", Google proved me wrong, and I cried a little bit for all the programmers stuck using this ugly syntax.