With lockdown regulations sweeping the globe, many have found themselves spending altogether too much time inside with not a lot to do. [Peter Hall] is one such individual, with a penchant for flying quadcopters. With the great outdoors all but denied, he instead endeavoured to find a way to make flying inside a more exciting experience. We’d say he’s succeeded.
The setup involves using a SteamVR virtual reality tracker to monitor the position of a quadcopter inside a room. This data is then passed back to the quadcopter at a high rate, giving the autopilot fast, accurate data upon which to execute manoeuvres. PyOpenVR is used to do the motion tracking, and in combination with MAVProxy, sends the information over MAVLink back to the copter’s ArduPilot.
While such a setup could be used to simply stop the copter crashing into things, [Peter] doesn’t like to do things by half measures. Instead, he took full advantage of the capabilities of the system, enabling the copter to fly aggressively in an incredibly small space.
It’s an impressive setup, and one that we’re sure could have further applications for those exploring the use of drones indoors. We’ve seen MAVLink used for nefarious purposes, too. Video after the break.
Cool project, companies spend thousands of dollars on a system like this, great idea to use SteamVR tracking for it.
I wonder how hard it would be to slap some RGB LEDs on a smartphone and use something like this for indoor positioning for AR?
Crazy idea
Appears to be missing a couple of options:
1: fly and land within the boundaries of the camera view.
2: whisper mode.
3: dislodge all paper notes from the walls and disperse them around the room.
4: empty the ash trays mode.
5: hunt down, slice and dice all mosquitos and flies.
what kind of drone was used in this experiment?
https://www.diatone.us/products/diatone-mxc-taycan-duct-3-inch-cinewhoop-fpv-drone Frame only, need a flight controller with more flash to run ArduPilot.