SkyDive
January 9, 2021, Kraków
SkyDive is a project that started in 2015. It consists of two bigger parts. First one is about a multirotor embedded controller system. The second one is an application that allows business usage of unmanned aerial vehicles in any conditions. Drone controller was started as our (my and my brother) graduate thesis at the university and then we continue this project to get a sellable product. Fleet management application is a natural continuation of what UAV business required at the time - 2018.
Flight controller
As a flight controller brain we’ve decided to use an STM family microcontroller that is capable of doing all required computation at a huge rate. Its possibility to be programmed in C++ was a great advantage for use as our user desktop application and whole library was natively coded in C++.
The board is fully designed by the Craftise team, partially produced by external parties and finally soldered inhouse by us. Outstanding hardware performance is proven in numerous VLOS and BVLOS flights where non of our fleet drones was lost.
On-board of that beast board we’ve placed all necessary sensors and all commercially used interfaces to run unmanned vehicles. Besides PWM inputs and outputs, external sensors there is external UART control input to provide commands via dedicated communication tools.
Direct communication with the controller board can be done with a desktop app. There you can configure main flight parameters of your drone or set up autonomous flight mode with waypoints. The app is built with the QT C++ framework. Additionally application feature is a virtual cockpit that allows to observe flight parameters and current drone position on the map.
At the final stage of the project we’ve also added a video stream and native Android application was created. With this tool it was possible to control the drone with the touchscreen of a smartphone.
Fleet manager
Control protocols used to steer our controller board were designed to be easily encapsulated in transport layer protocols. This allowed us to dream about making TCP/UDP controlled drones and what is even more advanced - LTE connected drones. In the beginning we started with simple VPN driven connections, but soon it happened to be not enough as UAV operations required a more advanced control layer regarding pilots allowance.
With that understanding our team started to work on additional possibilities above UAV control protocols to allow privilege based access to drone capabilities such as control, stream or maintenance. This approach led us to fleet management application with web interface for users and backend device connections that connected all the mission participants.
This setup was used during show operations controlled from Ottawa, Canada where UAV was flying in Kraków, Poland. Report from that flight and more details can be found in our YouTube video.
Summary
During these many years we were able to build a complete UAV control system, starting with in-flight stabilization and control algorithms, moving to user interface and finishing at a globe wide drone access system. Unfortunately this project was created too early to get into commercial usage as still we do not have enough law regulations to enable UAV business around the world. The knowledge we've gained during this time is priceless and it allowed us to do much more. Hopefully, someday we will be able to resurrect this one and our experience to drive unmanned operation in the sky again!
Team
More materials
SkyDive communication protocol description: link