Monday, August 12, 2013

Autonomous Quadricopter for Forest Fire Detection

I just recently finished my Master's Degree at Rochester Institute of Technology.  My final project was to design a control system for a Quadricopter that would be able to track forest fires as they spread.  All of the code is at https://github.com/Sanderi44/AR-Drone-Fire-Detection.  Here is the description from the paper:
"An autonomous control mechanism for tracking forest fires was designed with the use of an inexpensive, commercially available quadcopter.  The Parrot AR Drone 2.0 was chosen for this project because of its large open source programming community and many on-board sensors, including two cameras.  Image processing was performed on the video stream sent from the drone’s frontal, high definition video camera.  A few different fire detection algorithms were used with to make sense of the video data.  Then, after processing the video, object detection was performed to find the location of the fire.  Finally, the drone was told to move according to the location of the fire."
Below is the final presentation:

Working with Google's Cartographer SLAM Package

At my current position, at Canvas Construction, I have worked with a number of SLAM and localization packages. In the past few years, my wor...