Leapcopter

I finally purchased a Parrot AR Drone 2.0 this week after having a blast playing with one at JSConf last year! I also recently got a Leap Motion controller, and I thought it would be fun to get them to play together!

Source available on Github.

The leapjs code was a bit buggy, especially when trying to use it from Node, so I am interacting with the Leap Motion exclusively in Chrome and then using socket.io to send commands up to the server, which is controlling the drone.

On the server, I am using node-ar-drone to control the drone, and ar-drone-png-stream to get the video feed from the drone in the browser.

Here is a list of gestures and the what action they invoke:

• Key Tap - toggle the drown (takeoff/land)
• Circle - make the drone do a flip
• Tilt Palm Down - make the drone go forward
• Tilt Palm Up - make the drone go backwards

The drone moves very slowly, as I didn’t trust a Leap-controlled drone to go flying fast in my house quite yet. Also, once ‘Land’ is triggered, the drone won’t take off again, just in case I panic and start flailing about in front of the sensor.

My future plans for this demo include to cleaning up the code (it’s a mess right now), and adding more gestures (turning, up/down).