Drone Control is an interactive drone simulator where users of any age can learn and use basic coding concepts in an accessible and interractive format (Scratch-style blocks or simple code) to command a simulated drone to achieve a goal, e.g. navigation of obstacle course or maze and to engage with control system design in a limited form, e.g. modify parameters in simulation to improve the flight dynamics of a quadcopter.

Intended to support at least 50 concurrent users, scalable to more and to run on Chrome, IE/Edge, Firefox, Safari on Win and Mac. Javascript is used heavily to allow this to scale easily.

• Node.js v15+
• http-server or similar

• Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/spe-uob/DroneControl.git

• Modify AUTONAVx to postMessage to any URL, navigate to software/frontend/autonavx/js/init/viewer.js and change line 63

window.parent.postMessage({source: 'drone simulator', message: 'drone loaded'}, "https://dronecontrol.netlify.app/")

to

window.parent.postMessage({source: 'drone simulator', message: 'drone loaded'}, "*")

• Start AUTONAVx server

cd software/frontend/src/assets/autonavx
http-server

• Now that AUTONAVx is running, you will need to modify line 38 in Grid.js and line 25 in Simulator.js so the URL for postMessage and iframe matches the URL where AUTONAVx is running. If using http-server this should default to http://127.0.0.1:8080

• Install required packages in frontend

cd software/frontend
npm install

• Start development server with hot reload etc

npm start

You now should be able to access the website at localhost:3000

For postMessage to work without errors some headers need to be set, the required headers can be found in the root directory of AUTONAVx and the frontend in the netlify.toml file. If you are deploying somewhere else you will need to create a config for your specific webserver.

• AUTONAVx postMessage URL should be modified from any (*) to frontend URL for security reasons, see development setup for where to change this

• Start AUTONAVx server

cd software/frontend/src/assets/autonavx
http-server

• Modify the postMessage and iframe URL as in the development setup

• Build the frontend

cd software/frontend
npm run build

• And deploy

cd build
http-server

Website is now up and running