I’ve been experimenting with putting 360 degree vision, including stereo vision, onto a Crazyflie nano quadrotor to assist with flight in near-Earth and indoor environments. Four stereo boards, each holding two image sensor chips and lenses, together see in all directions except up and down. We developed the image sensor chips and lenses in-house for this work, since there is nothing available elsewhere that is suitable for platforms of this size. The control processor (on the square PCB in the middle) uses optical flow for position control and stereo vision for obstacle avoidance. The system uses a “supervised autonomy” control scheme in which the operator gives high level commands via control sticks (e.g. “move this general direction”) and the control system implements the maneuver while avoiding nearby obstacles. All sensing and processing is performed on board. The Crazyflie itself was unmodified other than a few lines of code in it’s firmware to get the target Euler angles and throttle from the vision system.
Below is a video from a few flights in an indoor space. This is best viewed on a laptop or desktop computer to see the annotations in the video. The performance is not perfect, but much better than the pure “hover in place” systems I had flown in the past since obstacles are now avoided. I would not have been able to fly in the last room without the vision system to assist me! There are still obvious shortcomings- for example the stereo vision currently does not respond to blank walls- but we’ll address this soon…
