Drone (UAV) - Precise movement without GPS

We're working on a proof of concept to get an off-the-shelf drone to move precisely using a visual target.

The goal of this project is to take as input the current position of the drone, and the desired position of the drone, and move the drone precisely to the desired position.

We have built a visual positioning system, that uses POSE estimation to determine the drone's position using the camera. It can determine position 10 times a second (every 200ms), so positions are 200ms old.

Our challenge is that when we attempt to move the drone based on this data, it moves very imprecisely. Examples:

1. When attempting to make it loiter in one spot, it moves around +-30cm, we'd like it to move only within +-5cm.

2. When attempting to move the drone (10cm, 10cm, 10cm), we'll get errors as much as 40cm in a single dimension.

Details:

- This is a 3DR Solo drone: [url removed, login to view]

- Our code runs on the 1Ghz Linux computer on the drone, which is physically connected to the PixHawk2 flight controller

- We hope to improve the performance of the visual positioning system, hopefully to 100ms latency, or perhaps even 30ms, but there is no guarantee this will be possible.

I'm hiring someone because I don't know how to solve this problem, but, here are some ideas I have on how someone might solve this problem:

1. Integrate IMU data for more precise positioning

2. Integrate visual positioning data into the PixHawk (Arducopter) EKF

3. Somehow write code in the PixHawk firmware to directly control motors using a PID controller based on visual position

Drones PHP Arquitectura de software

Nº del proyecto: #10528518

Sobre el proyecto