Quadrotor Autonomous Flight and Obstacle Avoidance with Kinect Sensor

More info: http://hybrid.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bouf...

This work is part of the STARMAC Project in the Hybrid Systems Lab at UC Berkeley (EECS department). http://hybrid.eecs.berkeley.edu/

Researcher: Patrick Bouffard
PI: Prof. Claire Tomlin

Our lab's Ascending Technologies [1] Pelican quadrotor, flying autonomously and avoiding obstacles.

The attached Microsoft Kinect [2] delivers a point cloud to the onboard computer via the ROS [3] kinect driver, which uses the OpenKinect/Freenect [4] project's driver for hardware access. A sample consensus algorithm [5] fits a planar model to the points on the floor, and this planar model is fed into the controller as the sensed altitude. All processing is done on the on-board 1.6 GHz Intel Atom based computer, running Linux (Ubuntu 10.04).

A VICON [6] motion capture system is used to provide the other necessary degrees of freedom (lateral and yaw) and acts as a safety backup to the Kinect altitude--in case of a dropout in the altitude reading from the Kinect data, the VICON based reading is used instead. In this video however, the safety backup was not needed.

[1] http://www.asctec.de
[2] http://www.microsoft.com
[3] http://www.ros.org/wiki/kinect
[4] http://openkinect.org
[5] http://www.ros.org/wiki/pcl
[6] http://www.vicon.com

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Silverhairedmage]

Hello Skynet, my killer kinnect machine keeps targeting the neighbors cat

[BigBass992]

next stop: MANHACKS!!

[thunergun]

i want one...

[Thomas Mason]

the thing that stood out to me was this is a form of thinking. it is looking out at the world and thinking about its enviroment before interacting with it.

[Hugh Jass]

Cracked.com

[UtopianMatt]

Shut up and take my money !

[398221002]

SKYNET!

[najib osman]

Cracked sent me here!

[Ronnieisup]

One of the most advance commercial 3D camera sensors in the world, and to think i can find it on craigslist for 40 bucks

[ceasefire066]

"hi neo! welcome to the matrix!!"

[Nick Fletcher]

wow, if you can map a room with a kinect, imagine the kind of shit that the military have got!

[Haydn Hamilton]

whatever you dont do the MOONWALK in front of it!..it wiil go beserk just like Jackson!