The main goal of this project is to promote and encourage autonomous aviation or unmanned flights, specifically drones, which have many potential use cases like surveillance, parcel delivery, military, search and rescue, aerial photography and mapping, agriculture, and many more. In this project, where the drone's movement is guided using Alexa voice service, the integration of various software services/applications(AWS Lambda, WebSocket API Gateway, and more) is crucial. The below diagram depicts a brief overview of the project
- Drone with ArduPilot firmware compatible PixHawk flight controller
- A computer for running a custom ground control station (GCS) software
- SiK Telemetry Radio for communication between the ground station and drone
- Amazon Echo device
- Amazon Web Services account { Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB }
- DroneKit Python API
- Amazon developer account for Alexa Skill programming
- Voice commands
- Takeoff
- Change altitude
- Fly in a specified direction for a specified distance(in meters)
- Return to launch position
- Know status of drone(mode, distance from home location etc..)
- Geofence
- A cylindrical geofence is drawn centered at the launch location
- Commands which require the drone to fly beyond geofence radius/altitude will be discarded/rejected and not executed
- Geofence radius and altitude are customizable
- Radius and altitude are both measured in meters