A quadrocopter automatic control contest as an example of interdisciplinary design education

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have many applications and quickly gain popularity with the availability of low-cost micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). Robotics is a popular interdisciplinary education target as it involves understanding and collaboration of several disciplines. Thus, UAVs can serve as an ideal study platform. However, as robotics requires technical background, skills and initial efforts, it is commonly applied in long-term courses. In this paper we successfully exploit the opposite case of robotics in short-term education for students without background, in form of a one-day contest on automatic visual UAV navigation. We provide an extensive survey, and show that existing material and tools do not fit the task and lack in technical aspects. We introduce a novel open-source programming library that comprises programs to guide learning by experience and allow rapid development. It makes contributions to marker-based tracking, with a novel nested-marker design and accurate calibration parameters estimated from 14 Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 front cameras. We show a detailed discussion of the contest results, which represents an extensive user study regarding robotics in education and the effectiveness of the library. The achievement of a steep learning curve for a complex subject has important implications in interdisciplinary design education, as it allows deep understanding of potentials and limitations to facilitate decision-making, unconventional problem solutions and novel applications.

Marker-based tracking with unmanned aerial vehicles

“…(left) Co-located design, for a series of 9 NyARToolkit NyID markers. The optimal marker width ratio r w = 0.5 √ 5 − 1 ≈ 0.618 minimizes the size according to the constraint in (6). (right) Nested design, for a series of 5 markers, created using color-permutation.…”

“…The library has been successfully applied in a contest on autonomous drone navigation with students from different fields, where we found that a UAV can be a good educational tool to foster collaboration requiring multilateral perspectives (Sec. VII) [6]. This supports that robotics serves as a popular interdisciplinary education target, because making things move as intended involves understanding of several disciplines [7].…”

Real-time Beacon Distance Revision Method in Indoor Environment

“…There are studies where the UAV recognizes the marker and controls the current position of the UAV [1]. There are also studies that utilize Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) to create maps and locate positions [2].…”

Graph-based motor primitive generation framework

“…For example, markers attached to walls are recognized by cameras on the UAV, and then the UAV is controlled autonomously by utilizing the recognized markers [11]. For autonomous flight, direction control and altitude control are required.…”