Taking off - “Hello world” example

The first thing you might want to do with Olympe is making your drone to take off. In this example we’ll write a simple Python script that will connect to the simulated drone we’ve just created and then send it a TakeOff() command.

Create the following Python takeoff.py script somewhere in your home directory:

import olympe
import os
import time
from olympe.messages.ardrone3.Piloting import TakeOff, Landing

DRONE_IP = os.environ.get("DRONE_IP", "10.202.0.1")


def test_takeoff():
    drone = olympe.Drone(DRONE_IP)
    drone.connect()
    assert drone(TakeOff()).wait().success()
    time.sleep(10)
    assert drone(Landing()).wait().success()
    drone.disconnect()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    test_takeoff()

First, this script imports the olympe Python package and then the TakeOff() command message from the Piloting feature module (one of the Ardrone3 features module). A “feature” is just a collection of related command and event messages that the drone exchanges its controller (FreeFlight, SkyController, Olympe, …).

Next, this script creates the drone object of the olympe.Drone class. This class constructor requires only one argument: the IP address of the drone. For a simulated drone, we can use 10.202.0.1 which is the default drone IP address over the virtual Ethernet interface. For a physical drone, it would be 192.168.42.1 which is the de default drone IP address over Wi-Fi. Finally, when connected to a SkyController over USB, the SkyController is reachable at 192.168.43.1.

olympe.Drone.connect() actually performs the connection to the drone. This would fail and return False if the drone is unreachable (or non-existent) for some reason.

Then, drone(TakeOff()).wait() sends the TakeOff() command message to the drone and then waits for the drone to acknowledge the command. When the wait() function returns, our simulated drone should be taking off. For now, we will always use the drone(....).wait() construct to send command message and will explain later what the wait() function does and what we could do differently with or without it.

Finally, olympe.Drone.disconnect() disconnect Olympe from the drone properly.

To execute this script and see your drone taking off, from the same shell/terminal you’ve just source’d the shell script:

$ python ./takeoff.py