Video Version:
Micro Aerial Vehicle – Unmanned aerial vehicles generally fall into categories roughly based on their size:
- Small: <10m across, and 10-25kg
- Mini: <5m across, and <10kg- Micro: <15cm across, and <100g – For more information (HS)
- Introduction to unmanned aerial vehicles by Penn Engineering Dean Vijay Kumar (HS & advanced)
Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) – An IMU is an electronic device that measures acceleration and angular velocity in order to calculate a robot’s pose. – Sparkfun description of IMUs, accelerometers, and gyros (7-12)
- Robot Academy course on measuring motion (HS)
- Coursera video on IMUs (advanced)
Motion Capture – “Motion capture, or mo-cap, is a process of digital recording of people or objects’ movements.” Robots use motion capture systems to measure their pose in 3D space. – Teslasuit (HS)
AprilTag – When motion capture systems are unavailable (such as outdoors or in unknown locations), robots can use AprilTags to determine their pose. AprilTags are two dimensional bar codes, similar to QR codes. Robots use cameras to detect AprilTags, which have known locations in the world. By computing the precise 3D pose of the AprilTag relative to the camera, robots can determine their own pose in 3D space. – University of Michigan (HS)
Features – Instead of relying on AprilTags, robots can use the world around them to determine their pose. “A robot can use a camera to capture an image of the world. The image contains millions of pixels, but the value of each pixel is not particularly informative about what’s present in the scene. We need a more concise or ‘higher level’ way to represent the information, and this is what we refer to as image features.” – QUT Robot Academy (7-12)
- Image features (HS)
- QUT Masterclass on Feature extraction (HS & advanced)