Drones You Can Release in the Air Like Birds

Here is another application of our high-performance distance sensor TeraRanger One. It's embedded in a system packed with accelerometers, gyroscopes, a camera  and onboard processing power.

The goal is to make a quadrotor system which can automatically recover and self-stabilize from any initial condition. The demo featured in the video is based on the idea of tossing sloppily the quadrotor in the air by hand and check that it reaches very quickly a stable state.  

Video Credit

The stabilization process works in stages:

1. The accelerometer detects that the quadrotor is in free fall
2. The gyroscope is triggered to stabilize orientation 
3. Distance sensor stabilizes height from the ground
4. Input from the onboard camera (using advanced computer vision algorithms) completes the stabilization process and the quadrotor locks into a stable position

This is a project from the  Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, led by Prof. Davide Scaramuzza. They are world leaders in in the field of computer vision applied to the autonomous navigation of visually-guided ground and micro flying robots.