The Australian CSIRO has developed an interesting reasonably lightweight close proximity mapping solution for indoor application where GPS is not required. I thought it might have an interesting application as a navigation system for multicopters indoors? Love that 'bobbing worm'!
Whilst not quite small enough for multi-copters, it does not look far off.
More info at this Link
Comments
Very seriously cool.
I am curious to know how they maintain their apparently very solid relative positional information as the point cloud acquisition progresses.
Vertically scanning a Hokuyo laser scanner is a common way of obtaining a X/Y 3D point cloud, but generally sequential scans from a moving platform require a lot of work (CPU time) to "line up".
Apparently they do that in real time on a laptop and that does not seem an easy task.