Welcome to the UdaciDrone API!
This is the Udacity Drone Python API. It provides an interface for communicating with your quadcopter in the simulators provided in the Flying Car Nanodegree Program, and for communicating with a real drone if you wish to do so.
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The API is designed in two parts: a Drone class and a set of connection classes. The Drone class provides a representation of the physical or simulated drone enabling interaction with the connected drone. The connection classes are protocol specific implementations of the abstract Connection class, enabling the Drone to be configured to communicate over several different protocols used with drones today.
For those looking to just dive right in to using the UdaciDrone API, check out our Getting Started guide.
The core element of the UdaciDrone API is the Drone class. This drone class is a representation of the physical or simulated drone you are connect to. Through this Drone class, you are able to retrieve state information and send various commands. Most importantly, Drone is communication protocol independent, which means any code you write interacting with Drone will work on any simulator or drone who's protocol has a Connection implementation!
For a detailed understanding of the Drone class, check out the detailed Drone documentation.
These set of classes contain implementations of specific communication protocols over which Drone can connect with a real drone or simulator. Currently, the only supported protocol is the Mavlink Protocol used in the Dronecode community. This means that this API currently only works with the Udacity Simulator and any PX4 powered drone!.
For a detailed understanding of the Connection class, check out the detailed Connection documentation.
Two different reference frames are defined and used within the Drone API. Global positions are defined as [longitude, latitude, altitude (positive up)]. Local reference frames are defined [North, East, Down (positive down)] and is relative to a nearby global home provided. Both reference frames are defined in a proper right-handed reference frame. The global reference frame is what is provided by the Drone's GPS. Two convenience functions, global_to_local() and local_to_global() are provided within the frame_utils.py script to convert between the two frames. These functions are wrappers on utm library functions.