The development of indoor positioning aerial robot based on motion capture system

Abstract

The quadcopter technology has been developed for many years. It has the advantages of light weight, small size, high mobility and autonomy. At present, it is already a proven technology, especially in outdoor environments. As the Global Positioning System (GPS) can provide accurate geographic coordinates for quadcopters, this endows the drones with certain abilities, such as loiter and waypoint navigation. However, the GPS is flawed by the shadowing effect, which prevents its indoor use. It also prevents quadcopters from exerting those previously mentioned function enabled by the GPS. In this study, we used the motion capture system as an indoor localization system that provides 3D coordinates for quadcopters through the 433MHz nRF905 wireless communication module. The visual C# software was used to design a user interface (UI) which can show the current position of the quadcopter for real-time control. Finally, three multi-rotor flying robots were simultaneously controlled for coordinated indoor group flight through the human machine interface (HMI) developed for this study.