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.