Nicholas Pacholski has joined CDIT to complete his Honours year research project. Welcome Nicholas!

Nicholas will be working on the development of a Smart Drone Positioning system. We are exploring the capabilities of various devices such as the AR Drones, which are radio controlled flying quadrotor helicopters designed to be controlled with iOS and Android devices. The AR Drone has several motions sensors located under the central hull: The AR Drone features a 6 degrees of freedom (DOF), micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) based, miniaturized inertial measurement unit. It provides pitch, roll, and yaw measures. Inertial measurements are used for automatic pitch, roll and yaw stabilization and assisted tilting control. They are needed for generating realistic augmented reality effects. An ultrasound telemeter provides altitude measurement for automatic altitude stabilization and assisted vertical speed control.

In this project, Nicholas will design and implement an on-drone distributed positioning system, taking into consideration computational and power constraints, which require design and implementation of a distributed calculation mechanism to allow drones in a pack to determine their position (and that of their neighbours), based on their sensor data and on data sniffed from sensors from other drones in the pack.