From my colleague, Simon Levy:

http://home.wlu.edu/~levys/software/ardrone_autopylot/ Works with AR.Drone 1.0 and 2.0. No learning curve -- you just modify a single, already-written Python function. Only hitch is you need to be running Ubuntu. If you have a Mac, you can just use VMWare ($50) or VirtualBox (free) and install Ubuntu on top of that.