This week I ran into a problem where I needed my laptop to connect to my drone’s wifi but I also needed an internet connection for my speech to text API to convert my speech commands into text commands. Due to this issue, I tried looking for offline APIs. For the first try, I used pocket sphinx which is a part of the CMU Sphinx Open Source Toolkit For Speech Recognition. I ran through some errors along the way but when it finally started working it gave widely inaccurate results. My second try was the VOSK speech recognition toolkit which worked better than the one I used before but was tough to work with. Then finally, I used a wireless USB LAN adapter to connect my laptop to the drone and used my computer’s wifi to connect to the internet so I could use the APIs that required an internet connection. I went back to using Google’s speech-to-text API.
Alongside the speech-to-text API issue, I was also working on trying to connect to the drone using my python code. I tried using different python commands to control the drone. I experimented with different commands that could flip the drone, make it travel in a curve, etc. Then, I also wanted to look at how accurately the drone followed the commands. For example, when I sent the command to move forward by 20 cm, it moved in the right direction but the measurement had some fluctuations by about 15%. I repeated this continuously to see how off the drone was. During the trials, I also realized that the drone gets a little unstable during the flight sometimes which messed up the measurements. I plan to work on improving the stabilization later in the project.
