http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/occipital/structure-sensor-capture-the-world-in-3d
Came across this Kickstarter project launched today which has already achieved its $100,000 target (within few hours). It seems the sensor is almost like a Kinect sensor. Most important plus points are
- Weight 99g
- Including built-in battery claims to have 3-4 hours of active usage.
- Open source product.
- Works on any device having USB, *not* limited to Apple iPads.
- OpenCV creator Dr. Gary Bradsky is also involved in this project (Board member of Occipital, Inc).
Overall, this seems to be a great product that can be used in an indoor Drone!
Already pledged of course :-).
Comments
Sorry to get back so late @Aero Matic. You could use this sensor for indoor navigation of drones.
On a separate note, Primesense was acquired by Apple :- http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/11/24/apple-reportedly-finally-sea...
so what has this got to do with Drones? like a few posts this week.
small size and portability is the great advantage it offers :)
Robert has mentioned about one video i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h6vniZxwjk
In outdoors kinect works under shade etc and at under direct sunlight it behaves as a monocular camera (only colour camera with no depth). So, considering this thing in mind, we have developed an approach to work with kinect at outdoors using inertial sensor (a key idea is switching from color-depth information to monocular camera information at conditions like sunlight, limited range etc). Usually in outdoor cluttered environment (e.g. dense forest etc), Kinect works as a color-depth and color-only sensor which is handy to get 3D maps etc.
Cheers
Hi Robert,
The Kinect can work limitedly outside in not full sunlight.
Even in non direct sun (shade) illumination resolution and distance are somewhat reduced but usable.
But in direct sun pretty much forget about it.
The Kinect's internal IR emitter just doesn't put out enough light to outshine the sun.
This is true for their new TOF Kinect 1 as well although it may work somewhat better than the structured light Kinect.
Even the small and relatively eye safe TOF laser scanners are very limited in direct sunlight with considerably reduced distance and much higher false readings.
The Blog in here for the Laser rangefinder based altimeter can work considerably better, because using a relatively low data rate and a very fast short "Pulsed" laser light it can use a quite high peak power laser while still keeping the average power relatively low. This also requires the use of an avalache photodiode specifically designed to trigger in a very short high power light burst.
http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/lightweight-low-cost-laser-altimeter
The negative consequence of this is generally in reduced data rate and increased cost.
If the Kinect can't work outside, how come we have seen at least one example of somebody making it work outside?
Yey :) I'm working on an internal GPS project but this will help with sensor navigation. Keep us up to date on progress :)
@McCray, yup I agree with you. Sun produce a lot of IR. These are only good for indoor use.
Good to see somebody taking advantage of the Prime Sense Capri.
When I contacted Prime Sense they expressed no interest at all in the open source developer market and were solely interested in Companies with 100,000 unit per month sales potential.
I guess that didn't work out so well for them.
It is interesting to note that for the next generation Kinect 1 coming out in November, Microsoft has dumped Prime Sense and the structured light approach entirely and is no going with a considerably higher resolution Time of Flight 3D camera for the New XBox 1.
The whole advantaged to the Capri is it's small size and I am glad that someone will be making it available for our little copters and rovers.
Neither this or even the new Kinect will work at all adequately outdoors in sunlight however, sun is just too much for these things.
This could be a great game changer.
Earl
This would be great for navigation and sense and avoid.... Imagining a quad flying/navigating in the woods 3ft off the ground to a waypoint...