Highly intelligent AI robots remain a staple of science fiction; still somewhat difficult to find in real life.
For example, if you want a quadcopter that performs custom arbitrary tasks autonomously, you’ll have to build one yourself. And if you build it wrong – one wrong wire or one wrong software configuration – it won’t fly. Or worse, it will flip over and dash itself to pieces, as if to spite you. Ask us how we know.
Astral does the heavy lifting (and crashing) so that you don’t need to.
Astral’s open-hardware modular quadcopter with Astral-built open-sourced software preinstalled. This allows you to focus on your particular use case.
Program it using the MAVROS open-source API, or install an app from Astral’s App Store, and away you go.
Astral’s unboxing experience will have you launching your hardware in 10 minutes. Which is something.
Our proud intern moments after launching his first Astral01 quadcopter.
So how do you operate your drone if not with a remote control transmitter?
Astral’s mobile app communicates with your drone via Astral’s cloud service.
The Astral mobile app allows you to remotely install and run apps, view live video and logs and manual override autonomous management if and when the time comes.
Astral’s mobile app also sends alert notifications to the user when necessary. Some examples include:
- Low battery
- Needs calibration
- No GPS fix
- Robot uprising (*feature still in development)
But what if you wanted to try out our SDK right now, without ordering one of our drones and waiting for it to arrive in the mail?
Install Astral’s SDK on any compatible (PX4) robot you happen to have. Or you can test drone apps in Astral’s freely available simulator, based on the open-source Gazebo project (more on this in an upcoming blog).
Here is the Python code for getting a drone to fly up and around before landing again. It works in the simulator as well as a physical drone.
Then deploy your drone app over the air – with one click via our mobile app or fleet management website onto one or more physical drones and you are ready to rule the skies!