Blogs

We were already using the Gumstix Overo COM in our winning EMAV 2009 entry. Other projects have started to adapt the system design with Linux onboard computer. It separates the Linux computer vision system and control/estimation code running on an external microcontroller. At that time we already did the electronics design for a custom camera board, but eventually used a USB machine vision camera. However now we have a working driver, which allows to attach the Aptina MT9V032 machine vision CMOS sensor directly to the Gumstix Overo COM. The board will be available from Gumstix Inc., but is not yet released as a product. The pxOvero base board weights only 28g including the camera with M12 glass lens! It works under very low light conditions and has a much lower noise level than typical webcams. We hope to see this pair soon in many computer vision MAVs. Our upcoming aerial robotics middleware is lightweight and has been developed so scale to lightweight computers. Together with this camera, it will provide a very convenient toolkit for computer vision on micro air vehicles.