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The robot page is arguably the most important page in the Dashboard. It provides information across several tabs, accessible in the top navigation bar.

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  • Heartbeats: these signals are sent by each block in the pipeline (joystick, altitude, state (estimation), PID) to the flight controller, and are safety signals. If for any reason one of the heartbeats stops publishing, the drone will disarm. Heartbeats can be manually overridden, but this is not encouraged unless you know what you are doing.

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  • Remote control: this is a virtual joystick used to manually control the drone. It can be used to control all robot “axis” (roll, pitch, yaw, thrust) or just a subset of these, based on the selection of the “Override” parameters.

Info

Override = On → the input to the flight controller for that axis comes from the joystick

Override = Off → the input to the flight controller does not come from the joystick

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Note

Remote control commands are sensitive. Go slowly, be cautious, get familiar with the interface and always look directly at the drone while operating it!

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Remote control commands:

W: pitch forward

S: pitch backwards

A: yaw counter-clockwise

D: yaw clock-wise

Drag green ball with mouse: increase / decrease thrust

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  • Arm / Disarm: Drones (yes, even happy Duckiedrones) have spinning propellers, hence are inherently dangerous. To minimize the chance of accidents, the drone is equipped with 3 arming states:

    • disarmed (0): This is the safe state. When disarmed, the motors will never receive commands.

    • armed (1): This is a dangerous state: When armed, the propellers will spin with idle motor commands, but not receive inputs from external nodes (e.g., the PID control node). Don’t let this terminology fool you though: you don’t want to have your fingers anywhere near spinning propellers. Never arm a drone near you, or when other humans or pets are around it!

    • flight (2): This is the most dangerous state:

      and an additional browser-interface-inspired layer of security:

    • pre-check: this is not a state of the Duckiedrone but rather a human miss-clicking prevention system. Unless pre-check is set to clear, the interface will not allow toggling any other state. This mean two consecutive willful clicks are necessary to get the propellers spinning ( 1. pre-checkclear; 2. disarmed → armed

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  • Remote control: this is a virtual joystick used to manually control the drone. It can be used to control all robot “axis” (roll, pitch, yaw, thrust).

    • When used concurrently to autonomous mode, the “Override” parameters allow maintaining manual control on all or a subset of the axis.

Info

Override = On → the input to the flight controller for that axis comes from the joystick

Override = Off → the input to the flight controller still comes from the joystick unless autonomous control signals (e.g., from the PID node) are sent too.

Note

Remote control commands are sensitive. Go slowly, be cautious, get familiar with the interface and always look directly at the drone while operating it!

Info

Remote control commands:

W: pitch forward

S: pitch backwards

A: roll left

D: roll right

Drag green ball with mouse: increase / decrease thrust

Drag green ball with mouse: yaw counter-clockwise and clock-wise

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  • IMU calibration:

  • PID reset:

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