PX4 team does mindblowing mapping and exploration with optical flow board
The PX4 team at ETH is a finalist for the IROS 2012 Best Paper award for this work, which uses the PX4 and the forthcoming PX4Flow optical flow board (coming soon from 3D Robotics) to do this:
We describe our autonomous vision-based quadrotor MAV system which maps and explores unknown environments. All algorithms necessary for autonomous mapping and exploration run on-board the MAV. Using a front-looking stereo camera as the main exteroceptive sensor, our quadrotor achieves these capabilities with both the Vector Field Histogram+ (VFH+) algorithm for local navigation, and the frontier-based exploration algorithm. In addition, we implement the Bug algorithm for autonomous wall-following which could optionally be selected as the substitute exploration algorithm in sparse environments where the frontier-based exploration under-performs.
We incrementally build a 3D global occupancy map on-board the MAV. The map is used by the VFH+ and frontier-based exploration in dense environments, and the Bug algorithm for wall-following in sparse environments. During the exploration phase, images from the front-looking camera are transmitted over Wi-Fi to the ground station. These images are input to a large-scale visual SLAM process running off-board on the ground station. SLAM is carried out with pose-graph optimization and loop closure detection using a vocabulary tree. We improve the robustness of the pose estimation by fusing optical flow and visual odometry. Optical flow data is provided by a customized downward-looking camera integrated with a microcontroller while visual odometry measurements are derived from the front-looking stereo camera. We verify our approaches with experimental results.
Here's the team and their birds. Huge and well-deserved congratulation!
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Moderator Comment by Roberto Navoni on October 5, 2012 at 3:17pm -
Great Work Lorentz ... what cpu use for Slam in this project ?
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Comment by John Githens on October 5, 2012 at 3:56pm -
Nice work, and here is a link to a related paper.
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Moderator Comment by Ruwan on October 5, 2012 at 6:57pm -
Nice work. I wonder the material they used for frame protector. Any ideas?
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Comment by W. Joe Taylor on October 5, 2012 at 10:00pm -
This is way awesome! Since at least 2004 the outstanding teams at the Swiss federal institute have consistently pushed the technical envelope for quad rotors. I can't wait to see what Sanford, Univ of Penn, MIT, and others publish on this in the next year or so. I also wonder if the team has integrated GPS, because it seems that would be trivial compared to this kind of achievement.
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Comment by Jack Crossfire on October 5, 2012 at 10:02pm -
It's mindblowing & face melting.
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Comment by Kabir on October 6, 2012 at 8:45am -
It's mindblowing & face melting.
+1 :)
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Comment by Jay Bryon on October 6, 2012 at 4:13pm
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Link to paper? Or competition?
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3D Robotics Comment by Chris Anderson on October 6, 2012 at 4:22pm -
Jay, sorry I missed a link above (it was in the video, but I've now added it above to make it easier to find). The citation to the paper is here:
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/hengli/mav_exploration/materials/in...
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Comment by Anish on October 8, 2012 at 3:06am -
cool , congrats guys :)
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Comment by Oliver Sumpton on October 9, 2012 at 12:22am -
What?! This is NUTS ! :D
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