Smartphones Power Flying Robots

This video showcases a research collaboration between our group at the University of Pennsylvania and Qualcomm Research in creating autonomous flying robots powered by smartphones. The (750 g, 54 cm diameter) robot is designed and build at Penn. The sensing, sensor fusion, control, and planning are all done on an off-the-shelf Samsung Galaxy S5 phone. The robot senses its environment and estimates its pose using information from the camera and IMU on the phone. The software for fusion, control, and planning for autonomous flight was developed at Penn. All the computer vision software was developed by Qualcomm Research and all software runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. This work was first showcased at CES2015 in Las Vegas, NV.