Flying Motion Capture System
Our outdoor aerial motion capture system's fleet includes 5 Octocopters, 4 Quadcopters and 4 Helium-based blimps. The Octocopters are 8-rotor VTOL vehicles which are based on the Microkopter's modular payload carrier. For open hardware flight control we use the Openpilot Revolution, interfaced with a 2.4GHz Graupner RC remote transmitter. An Intel i7 based micro-ATX server board and an NVidia Jetson TX1 are used for on board computer vision, aerial navigation and data storage on SSD. Sensors include a USB3 2 MP 60 fps global shutter camera, IMU, 3 axis compass, barometer, GPS receiver and a differential GPS receiver for reference position ground truth. They communicate using a 5GHz USB3 Wifi adapter. The Quadcopters carry the same payload as the octocopters except for the server board.
The blimps use buoyant lifting envelopes between 5 and 10 meters in length. They are actuated with control surfaces on each of their 4 tail-fins in a traditional + layout or a 3 tail-fins layout configured at 120 degrees between them. The 4 tail-fins layout blimps also have a lateral yaw thruster in the bottom tail-fin. Main propulsion are two independently-controllable thrusters - tiltable in pitch on a joint thrust vector axis through the gondola. For open-hardware flight control we use the Openpilot Revolution, interfaced with a 2.4GHz Graupner RC remote transmitter.
An NVidia Jetson TX2 is used for on-board computer vision, aerial navigation and data storage on SSD. Sensors include IMU, 3 axis compass, barometer, GPS receiver and a differential pressure sensor for airspeed connected to a pitot tube. Communication utilizes 5GHz USB3 Wifi integrated into the main computer.
The data acquired includes RGB Images at up to 60 fps and 6D poses of the aerial vehicles at 100 Hz. Additionally, we also record ground truth (GT) pose data of the tracked person using a body-mounted IMU suit and Diff-GPS tags. GT of Octocopters are recorded using Diff-GPS tags.
