drone developing - some general questions

Question

I want to develop some application that could work with drone.

1. I looking on the SDK of DJI and i don't understand how can i develop to their drone - because i want to write a code that can make the fly by self according to the information that the drone send to my application - and my application will send the flying commands

is it possible ?

2. Can i found some drone that i can write a code that will work on the drone himself and not only on my 'ground station' ?

for example - if i want to write a code that enable two drone to talk each other i need to write a protocol that will embedded on the drone.

3. Beside DJI that i rad about their SDK - is there are more drone brand that i can write a code to their drone ?

Answer 1

1. You would need to create a mobile app (either Android or iOS) and include DJI's mobile SDK to control the drones. The SDK already supports the flying commands.

2. DJI has a developer platform called Matrice 100. In this platform, we can bring your own computer (like Raspberry Pi or some other computer on a board) and run DJI provided onboard SDK to execute your programs.

3. There are a few other drone brands that support programming using SDK. A simple google search can help.

Answer 2

I think I can give some more details than the validated answer, so I hope that might be helpful.

1. DJI currently has an Android and iOS SDK. You can control the drone from your application using it (tell the drone to takeoff, go to a waypoint, take a picture, take a video, etc).

2. (Note that the following solutions are not sorted. It might depend on your needs)

   • If you get a 3DR Solo, you can write code on the drone directly. The preferred way for that would be to use DroneKit Python. DroneKit also works on Android, but will probably not be released on iOS (see the post from the 3DR Staff here). The Solo is very cool because you can simply SSH into its embedded Linux.
   • Still using DroneKit, you can build your own drone around the Pixhawk flight controller.
   • Parrot has an SDK for their drones, but you cannot run code on the drone itself. The interesting point is that their SDK is in C, with wrappers for Android and iOS.
   • If you get a Matrice from DJI, you can put your own controller (e.g.Raspberry Pi) on it and use the so-called onboard SDK from DJI.
   • Still using the onboard SDK, you can build your drone around the A3.
   • Using the mobile SDK from DJI, you can build your drone around the A2.
3. That is actually the same as 2, right?