Google Glass Used To Control Drone

Developers keep playing with Google Glass and hack the device to do a lot of cool stuff. Today we’ll show you how Blaine Bublitz, a coder from IcedDev, manages to control a drone by using his Glass. The developer uses JavaScript to control the drone, which is one of the most popular scripting languages and present on nearly all websites nowadays.

Bublitz showed off his Google Glass-controlled drone at , which is an event for Node.js developers. Node.js is a javascript platform based on Google Chrome’s javascript runtime that became very popular recently.

The video below shows how the drone is controlled with Google Glass. Bublitz tilts his head left and right  or up and down and the drone follows his movements moving back and forward. At the moment he only uses a wheeled drone, but we believe a flying one could work too with some more hacking. In order to achieve this he uses Google Glass’ sensors. Considering that Node.js is based on javascript, which is supported by all smartphones today, he could port his hack on any device in order to control the drone.

By moving his head up and down he controls the drone’s forward and backward acceleration. With left and right movements he steers the drone, which means he can control it really well.

Bublitz noted that he has to make some improvements in order to make it work better.

Turns out that I was driving the drone at full speed in each direction I tilted my head. I should have had the speed at about 0.3 instead of 1. Lesson learned. I would have also liked to add the ability to rotate the drone left and right based on the Glass’ azimuth value, but I guess that will have to be in the future.

The program is open source and available on , so you can download it if you have Google Glass and an AR drone. You can even develop it further if you wish.