Alexa Fly Drone
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I built a voice-controlled flying drone system using Alexa, the internet of things IOT service, AWS to participate in the Alexa Competition. This product won the best entertaining awards in this competition. You might be curious about where I got the idea and how I designed and built it in just two days. Let me tell you the secret now!
Since the day I saw the advertisement for the Alexa competition, I started brainstorming. I wanted to build something brand new and groundbreaking with the latest technologies. I kept asking myself - what are some of my favorite internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), or robotics products? Can I combine one of those with the Alexa skills to create something brand new? One night, while I was sitting at home and stared at my mini drone, one idea struck me. I asked myself - why not combine Alexa skills with drones. I love flying drones but I am not a good drone pilot. So let's ask Alexa to fly my drone! An idea was born - an Alexa skill that can fly drones by listening to voice input.
This was a moonshot project for me. Not much community support and not much information over the internet. It’s a hit or miss. I gave myself a weekend to figure it out. I told myself If I couldn’t prove the idea over one weekend, I should give up the idea and try something else instead. And you know the result already. YES. It did work. I built a brand new Alexa Drone Flying system and made it work in two days.
The whole system needs a couple of components in place for it to work. How it works:
Alexa skill receives voice commands such as fly my drone, left, right, up, down, and land.
Amazon Internet of things (IoT) service to receive voice commands from Alexa skill in the format of text and publish text command messages to mobile phone
Mobile App receives commands from Amazon IoT service and pushes those commands to programmable drone through Bluetooth
The programmable Drone then receives commands from the mobile App through Bluetooth
Done! You can fly your drone through the Alexa skills!
I have demoed this project for a live audience two times. I have created a website for the project and uploaded a youtube video to demo it as well. This is a fun project to build and a great concept to prove. It doesn’t matter it’s a drone or a robot. It opens a lot of opportunities for the future in the IoT & AI fields!
I wasn't sure how feasible the idea was. I did a lot of research and dived into all the technical details to see if this was even possible. At first, I couldn’t find any information regarding the voice flying system. To my surprise, eventually, I found something similar on . There is one open-source project which used AWS IOT service and a programmable drone to control the drone through a mobile App which built on drone SDK. I knew I found gold! All I need was to first make sure this open-source project really works and second prove the whole project will work with the Alexa skills I was about to build.
You can check out the demo video I recorded on YouTube .
You can find Mobile App I published on Goole Play Store for the project .
You can check out the project at my GitHub repo .
You can check out the website I made for this project .
If you want to learn more about it, let's catch up! Send me a message or shoot me an email at
