Quadrotor Uses Google's Project Tango to Fly Autonomously

 Robotics  

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have successfully demonstrated autonomous flight using an off-the-shelf Google Tango smart phone attached to a quadrotor.

Earlier this year, Google unveiled its Project Tango smartphone, a mobile device equipped with a depth sensor, a motion tracking camera, and two vision sensors that let the phone track its position in space and create 3D maps in real time, a process known as SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping).

This set-up has great implications for robots, which have to navigate and locate themselves in the world. As such, a video showed how Google and its partners were putting the smartphone on different kinds of robots, including mobile platforms and manipulator arms.

The Google device is remarkable because it lets you "literally velcro it to a robot and have it be autonomous."

Now researchers at the University of Pennsylvania led by Professor Vijay Kumar, where quadrotor swarms have already demonstrated amazing abilities, are moving on to the next logical phase of the work: attaching a Tango device from Google onto one of their quadrotors.

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Kumar says that a big challenge for researchers working with flying robots is not building them but rather developing hardware and software capable of making them autonomous. Many robots use GPS for guiding themselves, or, when flying indoors, they rely on motion tracking systems which offer great accuracy but requires that you install sensors on walls and ceilings.

The Tango phone does, opens new possibilities for flying robots. Kumar says that the Google device is remarkable because it lets you "literally velcro it to a robot and have it be autonomous."

Next, the researchers now plan to study Tango's accuracy of localization (and compare it to external motion tracking systems), but from their initial tests they estimate the accuracy to be within a centimeter. If that proves to be the case (and if Tango can be made cheap enough), it will be an impressive capability for the Google device, which could revolutionize how mobile robots and drones navigate indoor spaces.

Kumar says that the convergence of computation, communication, and consumers has a huge potential for the robotics industry, and a device like Tango is a key advance because it's "lowering the barrier to entry for autonomous robots."

The team has made a video of their results. In the first part of the video (below), Giuseppe Loianno, a PhD student in Kumar's group sets the quadrotor to hover at a fixed position and then disturbs it by moving it around, but the drone promptly returns to the starting point. Next he commands the drone to go to different places in the room and, even if disturbed, the drone recovers and stays on its programmed path.




SOURCE  IEEE Spectrum

By 33rd Square

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