Alexa Drone Pilot

Objective

To pilot a quadcopter drone with Alexa voice commands in real time

Source Code

https://github.com/jose-troche/AlexaDronePilot

There are two components:

• The Alexa application

• The mobile phone application that uses the IoT and Parrot SDKs

Video

Voice Interaction

Alexa start drone pilot... take off  > The drone takes off

Go up  > The drone flies up

Picture  > The drone takes a picture

... other commands ...

Land  > The drone lands

A Cloud Multi-Service Solution

Alexa captures voice commands and sends them to the Alexa engine to convert them into structured text commands. A recognized command is sent to an AWS Lambda function that publishes the command to an AWS Internet of Things topic to update the drone state.

On the other side of the world, a mobile application subscribes to the drone topic and listens for commands. The application connects securely to the Internet of Things using credentials obtained on first connection via Cognito. Every time a command is received, the mobile application sends the command to the drone. All this happens in real time.

Because the Internet of Things service supports multiple subscribers, a whole fleet of drones can be controlled with a single voice command. Furthermore, the drones could be replaced by other types of robots, machines, or devices. Therefore, the same principles can be applied to a diversity of domains.