Summer Progress

In the very first meeting we had over the summer we made the decision to make a huge change to our project. We realized that we would be extremely lucky if we could get through the project without breaking the lidar sensor at some point. And with a "cheap" lidar unit costing several hundred dollars, we decided we needed to try a different option. In the end we decided to go with an Xbox 360 Kinect sensor. The Kinect has both a regular RGB camera and a depth camera equipped. The best part about it is that it only costs around $30 at your local Gamestop. There is also plenty of support for the Kinect in the ROS environment. The room mapping with the Kinect will also be much more appealing. Instead of the two dimensional bird-eye-view room mapping that the lidar would provide, the Kinect will enable us to recreate the room as a point cloud in three dimensions and with color. We are very satisfied with our decision to switch to the Kinect, especially since we have already fried two Kinects over the summer which would have bankrupted us if they were lidar units.

Other decisions that we made over the summer were to use the Multiwii flight controller. This open source project seems to work well with the Raspberry Pi we are using as the brains of our quad-copter. It is well known for being cheap and simple while also being high quality.

As for a summer progress report, we were able to get ROS up and running on the Raspberry Pi and on the server computer that the Pi will report to. We hope to have the Pi report to the server in real time so that you can see the map as it is being generated, but that will be something extra to add once we have the base project running. We were able to get the Kinect working with a ROS package called rgbdslam and are able to generate colored three dimensional point clouds of the room by moving the Kinect around the room. We also managed to wire the Kinect, flight controller, and Pi to be battery powered.

The next goals that we are working on are to get the Pi and Multiwii talking to each other so that we can get our quad-copter off the ground and to come up with an obstacle avoidance routine using the Kinect's depth camera.