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Catching a Flying Ball with a Vision-Based Quadrotor

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2016 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER 2016)

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 1))

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Abstract

We present a method allowing a quadrotor equipped with only onboard cameras and an IMU to catch a flying ball. Our system runs without any external infrastructure and with reasonable computational complexity. Central to our approach is an online monocular vision-based ball trajectory estimator that recovers and predicts the 3-D motion of a flying ball using only noisy 2-D observations. Our method eliminates the need for direct range sensing via stereo correspondences, making it robust against noisy or erroneous measurements. Our system is made by a simple 2-D visual ball tracker, a UKF-based state estimator that fuses optical flow and inertial data, and a nonlinear tracking controller. We perform extensive analysis on system performance by studying both the system dynamics and ball trajectory estimation accuracy. Through online experiments, we show the first mid-air interception of a flying ball with an aerial robot using only onboard sensors.

The authors would like to thank the scholarship and equipment support from DJI.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Kunyue Su & Shaojie Shen

Authors
  1. Kunyue Su
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  2. Shaojie Shen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kunyue Su .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Gra Sch of Info Sci&Tech,Dept of MechInf, The University of Tokyo Gra Sch of Info Sci&Tech,Dept of MechInf, Tokyo, Japan

    Dana Kulić

  2. Computer Science Department, Stanford University Computer Science Department, Stanford, California, USA

    Yoshihiko Nakamura

  3. Department of Electrical & Computer Engg, University of Waterloo Department of Electrical & Computer Engg, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Oussama Khatib

  4. Department of Mechanical Systems Enginee, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Tech Department of Mechanical Systems Enginee, Tokyo, Japan

    Gentiane Venture

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Su, K., Shen, S. (2017). Catching a Flying Ball with a Vision-Based Quadrotor. In: Kulić, D., Nakamura, Y., Khatib, O., Venture, G. (eds) 2016 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics. ISER 2016. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50115-4_48

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50115-4_48

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50114-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50115-4

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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