AR-Drone as a Platform for Robotic Research and Education

This paper presents the AR-Drone quadrotor helicopter as a robotic platform usable for research and education. Apart from the description of hardware and software, we discuss several issues regarding drone equipment, abilities and performance. We show, how to perform basic tasks of position stabilization, object following and autonomous navigation. Moreover, we demonstrate the drone ability to act as an external navigation system for a formation of mobile robots. To further demonstrate the drone utility for robotic research, we describe experiments in which the drone has been used. We also introduce a freely available software package, which allows researches and students to quickly overcome the initial problems and focus on more advanced issues.