Formation flying basics in Drone Programming - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Formation flying basics

📖 Scenario: You are programming a group of drones to fly together in a simple formation. Each drone has a unique ID and a starting position represented by coordinates (x, y).To keep the formation tight, you want to calculate the relative positions of each drone compared to the leader drone.

🎯 Goal: Build a program that stores the drones' starting positions, sets the leader drone, calculates the relative positions of all drones to the leader, and then prints these relative positions.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with drone IDs as keys and their (x, y) positions as values

Create a variable to store the leader drone's ID

Calculate the relative positions of each drone compared to the leader drone using a dictionary comprehension

Print the dictionary of relative positions

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Drone teams often fly in formations for tasks like filming, surveying, or search and rescue. Calculating relative positions helps keep them coordinated.

💼 Career

Understanding how to manage multiple drones and their positions is important for drone operators, robotics programmers, and engineers working on autonomous systems.

1

Create the drones' starting positions

Create a dictionary called drones with these exact entries: 'drone1': (10, 20), 'drone2': (15, 25), 'drone3': (12, 22), 'drone4': (18, 30)

Drone Programming

# Create the drones dictionary with their starting positions
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary with drone IDs as keys and tuples for positions.

2

Set the leader drone

Create a variable called leader and set it to the string 'drone1' to mark the leader drone

Drone Programming

drones = {'drone1': (10, 20), 'drone2': (15, 25), 'drone3': (12, 22), 'drone4': (18, 30)}
# Set the leader drone ID
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the string 'drone1' to the variable leader.

3

Calculate relative positions

Use a dictionary comprehension to create a new dictionary called relative_positions where each drone's position is adjusted by subtracting the leader drone's x and y coordinates from its own coordinates. Use for drone, (x, y) in drones.items() to iterate.

Drone Programming

drones = {'drone1': (10, 20), 'drone2': (15, 25), 'drone3': (12, 22), 'drone4': (18, 30)}
leader = 'drone1'
# Calculate relative positions using dictionary comprehension
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Subtract the leader's x and y from each drone's x and y inside the dictionary comprehension.

4

Print the relative positions

Write a print statement to display the relative_positions dictionary

Drone Programming

drones = {'drone1': (10, 20), 'drone2': (15, 25), 'drone3': (12, 22), 'drone4': (18, 30)}
leader = 'drone1'
relative_positions = {drone: (x - drones[leader][0], y - drones[leader][1]) for drone, (x, y) in drones.items()}
# Print the relative_positions dictionary
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(relative_positions) to show the result.