{ "cells": [ { "cell_type": "markdown", "metadata": {}, "source": [ "# Hovering with Optical Flow\n", "\n", "In order for the drone to be capable of autonomous flight it needs some reference or estimate of it's position in the world. Outdoors we can use GPS. Indoors GPS doesn't work. If we have hundreds of thousands of dollars and a dedicated flight space, we can use a motion capture system for position information. Since we don't assume we have access to such a facility, we will be using _optical flow_ to get some sense of our position relative to the position we started.\n", "\n", "The theory and algorithms behind optical flow are beyond the scope of this module. Suffice it to say that optical flow is a way of using a video stream from an onboard camera in order for the drone to estimate its velocity which, in turn, can be used to estimate where the drone is relative to some arbitrary starting point. At this time we are only concerned with integrating existing libraries and hardware to enable optical flow on the Intel RTF Drone; any further discussion of the concepts and theory behind optical flow are left for a later module.\n" ] }, { "cell_type": "markdown", "metadata": {}, "source": [ "### Step 1: Install Libraries\n", "\n", "Ensure that you have completed [these setup steps](https://bwsi-uav.github.io/website/initial_setup.html#Step-5:-Optical-Flow-Libraries)\n", "\n", "