Gesture control of drone using a motion controller

In this study, we present our implementation of using a motion controller to control the motion of a drone via simple human gestures. We have used the Leap as the motion controller and the Parrot AR DRONE 2.0 for this implementation. The Parrot AR DRONE is an off the shelf quad rotor having an on board Wi-Fi system. The AR DRONE is connected to the ground station via Wi-Fi and the Leap is connected to the ground station via USB port. The LEAP Motion Controller recognizes the hand gestures and relays it on to the ground station. The ground station runs ROS (Robot Operating System) in Linux which is used as the platform for this implementation. Python is the programming language used for interaction with the AR DRONE in order to convey the simple hand gestures. In our implementation, we have written python codes to interpret the hand gestures captured by the LEAP, and transmit them in order to control the motion of the AR DRONE via these gestures.