Design and Development of a Bio-Inspired Airborne Tracking System With the Xbox Kinect

A. Dzaba, E. Mucasey, A. Bourreza and E. Schuster

International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, June 12-15, 2012

Abstract

The ability to navigate in unfamiliar environments is a key issue in implementing any autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In an effort to move closer to real-world application capability, we envision a specialized, mobile vision system capable of tracking a group of low-cost UAVs outside of the lab setting. We present an omnidirectional array of Xbox Kinect units for image acquisition and a custom embedded computer cluster for image processing. In order to ease the computational burden of the proposed vision system, the array is mounted on a stabilized, holonomic sensor deck which keeps its frame of reference constant throughout flight maneuvers. A simple PID controller is tested in simulation and experimentation to demonstrate the ability to decouple the orientation of the vehicle from the orientation of the sensor deck. We conclude with a roadmap for implementing well-established machine vision techniques on the newly-developed hardware.