Another entry to the Willow Garage Robot Operating System (ROS) 3D contest: a nice job of sensor fusion with a Kinect and optical flow sensors on a quad.
The ROS blog writes it up:
The Chair of Automation Technology at Chemnitz University of Technology shows just how versatile a Kinect on a quadrotor can be. Their entry, "Autonomous corridor flight of a UAV using the Kinect sensor", uses the Kinect to find the ceiling, walls, and floor of a corridor. Once the quadrotor knows the geometric structure of the corridor, it can happily fly down the middle to get where it needs to go.
Their demo is built on an AscTec Pelican with a stripped-down Kinect. To handle the rest of the autonomous flight needs, they use a ADNS 3080 optical flow sensor for position and velocity control, and a SRF10 sonar sensor for altitude control. Sample-consensus algorithms from PCL are used to convert the 3D point cloud data into the estimated positions of these surfaces. Remarkably, they managed to make all of this run on an Atom processor.
Comments
Very Cool. They're using the same mouse sensor that I'm just starting to play with.
I wonder where they got that cool RED LED (although infrared would be even better). I'm having a hard time finding something like that.