Sunohara & Shibuya Indoor Flight: A Solution for Autonomous Indoor Drone Navigation
0:36 Indoor Drone Applications in Japan: The presentation highlights the increasing demand for indoor drone applications in Japan, including tunnel monitoring, warehouse inventory, factory inspections, and building patrols.
2:07 Introducing the IND Drone: Drone Japan introduces the IND drone, featuring ModalAI's VOXL vision system and customizable payloads.
3:08 Vibration Mitigation: Efforts were made to reduce vibrations affecting the VOXL and flight controller through the implementation of dampers.
3:43 Backup Sensor Integration: A HereFlow optical flow sensor was added as a backup navigation system, providing additional data like velocity.
4:47 QGroundControl Integration: The solution utilizes a customized QGroundControl interface, enabling users to create waypoints for automated navigation on a 2D map of the indoor environment.
5:22 Indoor Flight Procedure: The workflow involves scaling and uploading a 2D indoor drawing as a map in QGroundControl, assigning internal coordinates for waypoints, and initiating autonomous flight.
6:36 Demonstration: A short demonstration showcases the IND drone's navigation capabilities using a 5-meter grid map, with the drone manually moved to simulate flight.
8:04 VOXL Confidence Monitoring: A function was added to monitor the quality of ModalAI's VOXL output, displayed as a confidence rate.
10:06 Technical Advancements: Randan, a collaborator on the project, discusses key improvements, including:
10:51 Object Avoidance in Auto Modes: Implementing a "simple avoidance" feature to stop the drone upon encountering obstacles.
11:40 Automatic EKF Source Switching: Enabling seamless switching between VOXL and optical flow data for navigation based on the VOXL confidence level.
13:54 VOXL Confidence Indication: Ensuring the VOXL quality metric is visible to the pilot via MAVLink telemetry.
14:43 Q&A: The presentation concludes with a Q&A session addressing questions about the VOXL's optical flow capabilities, heat management, EKF source switching smoothness, and performance in dynamic environments.