Groundhog Autonomous UAV – Going faster with sunglasses

The Groundhog is being developed to line-follow at low altitude and higher speeds.  This video is of the field testing taking the speed up to 1.75 m/s.  It also explains why the Groundhog now sports sunglasses.

The Track

An oval of 50mm red webbing, bends of radius approx 3m and straights of approx 15m. Testing took place in early morning with glancing sunlight on dew-soaked webbing – great for walking the dog but not so good for computer-vision.

Groundhog UAV curved line following

Part of a series of videos and blogs tracking the development of The Groundhog, which was entered into the MAAXX Europe 2017 competition earlier this year.

Having successfully tested the re-written code to follow straight lines using velocity vectors for control and NED space mapping for line detection, we test it around a 50m track comprising 50mm wide red webbing – and we speed it up a bit as well.

The test turned out to be quite successful, with following speeds of 1.5m/s achieved under autonomous control provided by an on-board Raspberry Pi 3.  This is significantly faster than the winning UAV in MAAXX Europe this year, which is quite pleasing!

The YouTube video shows both on-board and off-board camera footage, the former demonstrating the roaming regions of interest used by OpenCV to maintain a lock under varying lighting conditions.