Hello everyone!
I’m building a 15-inch/40 cm diagonal (so not a lot of space on it) drone designed for indoor flying. There’s no GPS on board. I aim to fly it in environments with repetitive ground patterns, like an anechoic chamber, at a maximum height of 5-6 meters.
Which sensor would you recommend for maintaining stable positioning? I’ve considered the PX4Flow, but it doesn’t seem ideal due to the repetitive ground pattern.
I’m already using a TFmini Plus microLidar for altitude hold.
If you are flying in one room your best bet is setting up a motion capture system and providing position information over MAVLink.
Other than that you can add some colour pattern to the room.
Optical flow sensors do not provide position data, only velocity data. So repetitive patterns should not be an issue. So there is no horizontal position control. When you want to hover, the quad tries to keep horizontal velocity near 0. But it is possible for the UAV to gradually drift.
But yes, repetitive patterns could be an issue for other types of position control, such as SLAM.
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Repetitive patterns are generally no problem for optical flow, but in an acoustic chamber that may be poorly lit, a lack of contrast could be a challenge.
I have a toy drone which is made for indoor flights, and when I fly it, since it doesn’t has GPS, it gradually drifts while hovering, so a camera like structure is present there at the bottom of that drone, which detects the tiles of my house by the patterns on the tiles and when the drone begins to drift rightwards automatically, it detects that the tiles are going leftwards and sends it’s FC, the data that tiles are going leftwards with certain speed and so the drone automatically increases the speed of certain motors so that it stops drifting. Same it does when it begins to go backwards, forwards and leftwards, or when it begins to rotate clock/anticlockwise. Some vision sensors exactly like this can be used in your indoor drone without GPS to maintain a steady hover?
We use the Miko AIR MTF-01—it’s a pretty good sensor.
Test it out, but I recommend buying three pieces and selecting the best one.
