Open Source Motion Capture for Autonomous Drones
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2025
- A low cost ($20), open source motion capture system with millimeter level precision at room-scale. Used to localize autonomous drones inside a room.
GitHub repo with code & 3D files: github.com/jyj...
Check out my blog post for more info on the drones, cameras, etc: joshuabird.com...
A college student in his dorm room... this is amazing, precise indoor location has been a constant challenge
Using ultra-wideband for ranging shouldn't be all that difficult actually
@@googleyoutubechannel8554 I'm using Qorvo DW3000 boards for an LED controller game to enable spatial interactions
This probably has been solved since vr headsets were a thing lol
@@xXlURMOMlXx Indeed, it's about the path not the goal or some wisdom quote, anyway it's just fun and also a proof for corps that you actually know smth
A college student in his dorm room... this is amazing, precise indoor location for less than 50 dollars total has been impossible. FTFY
Wow, you definitely deserve more views. Very cool project, also making it open source means a lot
by making it open source, the Future thanks you.
Open source gives you wings
@@moosesnWoopand the person that actually eventually tunes it a bit and monetizes it.
i ABSOLUTELY agree with your comment.
i can't find anyone else on youtube thats brought up the subject to such a level of detail
except the one guy that does the triangulation math for stereocamera pairs and depth estimation
Very rarely a maker actually shares the math and science behind their projects. You sir have earned my subscription. Cant wait to see what you make next
there actually is a lot of youtube videos accompanying research papers, it's just that they don't scream and jump-cut, so the algorithm won't serve them. but many GitHub pages do have embedded yt videos similar to this one.
Because it's reproducible, that makes it science!
Same!
well, kinda sorta
(thought i do think VERY positively about joshua and his content here)
there's still the bump off to the first prinicpals of computer visions playlist
its still, actually everything covering the field in that playlist.
My thoughts exactly, that and we use the same languages and frameworks.. I incorp Fastapi tho
Someone should give this guy access to a workshop: Very nice work!
I’m a senior graduating in Unmanned Aerial Systems and for my senior project I used an ESP32 and an ELRS transmitter to fly drones using any Bluetooth controller. And this project makes mine look like child’s play.
that degree has been useless since I got one in 2015.. the problem is the real drone work is not there yet unless you have military experience
@@technicalactivity looking back and forth at these two guys
back and forth and back and forth
esp32's? as a stereopair? depth map disparity maps? how bad was the lag? the video quality? or where those issues at all?
Military?
huh. yeah, i mean, well, active duty, in any field gets you the foot in the door with that five point advantage going on but, yeah, that just shows, the wave, its coming, just takes a little bit for commecial sectors to start accerting the change. it takes time.
but mne, personally im dedicating my life to the field at this point, been a vision of mine since i was 8
but yeah, to even get the experience working with others, i was aiming at riding up to fort hood a few miles from me and submitting an entry or my skills to the DARPA subterrain SLAM challange. i could see thats where it was at.
BUT, what do ya know. im an individual and thats not how things seem to work in the real world
regardless
i cant stop the obsession. MUST CONSUME MORE!!!! (maybe ill give DARPA another call in a year or so and see what they got on their books for us then )
That was a senior project ? In engineering school ?? 🤦♂️
Ya i want to know what school allowed that as a senior project so i know where to tell people not to go!@stevrgrs
ive done similar on a summer camp? where did u study
So a couple bucks in hardware but a good few thousand in knowledge
Wow! I wasn't expecting you to actually explain how the tracking worked! It's really cool that you did! Thanks!
oh the precious maker mentality of "this costs 10 dollars cheaper so i will spend 100 hours extra making it work"
Bravo, well done. This just poked human knowledge as a whole a bit further in both science and art. Thank you for both doing this experiment and documenting it and sharing it in such an endearing way. You worked extremely hard on this and it inspired me to model the way you shared your work. Bravo bravo.
I've had this video open in my browser for four months now, and I just can't get myself to close it. So freaking cool.
Bro is an undergrad student and already better than SDEs with 10 YOE... he should be making 500k easily
More like 500m as CEO of his own company.
Prolly will b soon
Depends how much of the system he made himself. There's not much glory in using premade hardware with premade software to do premade tasks in a controlled setting.
It's so thoroughly researched, followed to conclusion, and presented so cleanly. Plus.. reproducible. This is a legitimate publication
Maybe it is open source?
We've been doing exactly this with a single camera for head tracking in the flight sim community for a decade. First time I've seen someone make a proper mocap system out of it!
Your motivation, dedication and clear communication are more inspiring than the results.
Yet another amazing project...and made open source. You're the best Joshua!
Very cool work! I'm an robotics engineer, PHD, and flying drones in my free time. I thought about exactly the same project, but lack the time.
Very impressive, considering you are still studying. Keep up the good work. I see an upcoming excellent engineer / software developer. Don't underestimate the open paths that lie in front of you. If you keep up this pace, you can become whatever you want.
Love the clip where you literally just toss the drone on the floor. Crazy project. Props on completing it!
As a full stack web dev whose day job is mostly just LOB apps, and a hobbyist understanding of drones and embedded programming (I’ve done a bit of esp stuff) this is really impressive!
Just looking at your react front end with the stream data blows my mind a bit hey.
Amazing work!!
Super amazed by the tracking system. Off-the-shelf solutions are super expensive, but you managed to pull it off with just a lower budget. I'm saving this to potentially replicate it. Thank you for your hardwork!
do you know the name of the flight controler?
how is this man so criminally underrated
Genuinely impressive work. I'm reminded of a demo I saw years ago in which a drone would recognize that it was running low on juice, so it could land on a pad which would swap out the battery pack, like the Tesla S did for 15 minutes in a simpler time.
Anyhow, even more than getting it all working (which is a commendable feat) the real signal this project sends to someone who knows what they are looking at is that you're someone who can take a complicated problem that crosses multiple technical domains and then iterate on each aspect until you achieve an outcome. I would hire you in a heartbeat if I was in a position to do so.
Best project on the TH-cam this year. Please give us a more in depth tour of the code and sensors. This is awesome!
I'm blown away by the work you put into this! Simply amazing!
Really impressive, and incredibly well explained for such a complex and deeply technical project! I think my favorite aspect is your resourcefulness in utilizing the cheap cameras and floppy disk filter (MacGuiver would be proud)!!! All around inspiring work!
The amount of effort needed for these kind of projects makes me cry 😢
Such an impressive integrated system of multiple projects. The camera conversion project with custom IR filters is amazing in itself. What's fascinating is having 3 IR LEDs allows not only allows tracking position in space, but could enable determination of pitch, row, and yaw angles, so offers a number of possible options to modify and refine ... possibility leading to controlling a drone swarm.
This video/project may be enough to gain sponsorship for a dedicated internship project next summer. (one focused fun job, instead of two)
Nice project that's pretty amazing. Better yet nice explanation of all the algorithms you used to piece it together. You have a bright future.
Absolutely amazing work, wait until the VR community finds out about this.
This is incredible! I just checked some of your other projects as well. All of them just lit a fire in me. I recently got access to a makerspace so I definitely want to work on something like this. Big Fan all the way from South Africa.
Wow! This is basically the same principle of VR tracking with base stations applied to drones. This is awesome
inspiring project! 👏😎
terrifying
Very nice work, quite an achievement. Congrat's! :) And a huge thank-you for documenting it on YT so well and sharing the project.
Thank you for your contribution to the open-source community! This is an impressive project. I am excited to see how your ingenuity is used in the world in the years to come. Please know that many of us are inspired!
Maaan, what a great project!
I saw something similar made with high-speed cameras (probably costing thousands of dollars) AND YOU MADE THIS AWESOME THING for price of a meal, you are amazing!
this is a huge benefit for indoor drone use, as gps wont work as great under buildings. in the future drones will bring you food to you or any item you would like. really cool bro!
I love how simple and out shelf pieces you use
It is a great project showing how to do more WITH LESS. Outstanding job! Engineering is about this; these are your resources, and squeeze the maximum from them.
Thanks Joshua for sharing the maths and explaining your project in a very understable way. I thought I know a lot, you taught me different! Great job!
Super impressive. And fantastic that you've open sourced the project so that others can learn and benefit from it.
Wow, just wow excellent work Joshua
Oh my. That is magical. I know I know, just a lot of work, programming, and mistakes. Like all excellent work, many hours of effort for a few moments of magic.
This is insane! Great work
I thought about doing this myself at some point, but it ended there. Ideas are cheap and execution is expensive, after all. Amazing work on your end!
I love your projects. Thanks for sharing this one! I was super surprised about the high frame rate on the sony camera. Really just so cool to see people like you sharing this stuff, I have a project I’m working on that I am gonna release for the community that I hope is useful and good too :)
Honestly I'm amazed you got it flying that well at all with that monstrous chain of PID loops
This is amazing, I can imagine it has lots of applications, congrats
OMG, I'm sold after you wrote "hello"
Outstanding project and very well explained, even for us new to the subject. I can see this concept to be used in many different projects and showcases. Thank you for sharing.
Joshua, what a great project and nicely presented! I will definitely share this with my students next semester. Thank you.
If there is a teaching of the assembly process, it is a great introduction for beginners who are interested like me.
I'm way to high to understatement majority of this. will come back while sober, becouse this sounds amazing. whish you good luck on your future projects
Really cool project! Love that it all works in your dorm!
So cool how you combined the pid loops for a rough location of the point with non linear optimisation for converging on a minimum distance
This is fascinating.!
Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom on youtube!
There should be much more people like you in world. I wish I could do this stuff, very impresive
inpresive .. nice of you to show your drone craches
This is f*cking awesome. Really well explained. Congrats
You making it look simple that’s how you know you did a good job
What an awesome project.
Congrats on the work done here. I admire your dedication, ambition and passion.
👊Well Done
i knew i just had to subscribe to this hidden gem on youtube , Thanks for this upload
Absolutely amazing. You are brilliant and energetic and resourceful and an excellent communicator and I cannot wait to see what you do next.
This has incredible applications in the VR world! Especially for full body tracking!
you're truly a savant with your erudition, fantastic job!!! As well, appreciate your selflessness in sharing your source code.
That is very amazing ! And it means a lot to make the project open source....definitely gonna try it out...hats off...
YT just recommended your vid to me! and it's great!
I have had nightmares for decades about control systems and polar diagrams I got at school. But just like digital signal processing, that was only maths at my school, it is nice to finally have a real world example.
Man I've been trying to do something like this but could never make it happen. This is content
You are great bro❤ Best of luck for future projects... Love from Bangladesh 🇧🇩
This is some extremely impressive indoor positioning.
Massively impressive project, very well done & I'm glad to see your work shared. Hope we see more work spring up around it!
Well done! My dream is to do such things, but yeah working full-time and studying at the same time makes it tough 😂. Awesome!
Wow this is awesome!!! You could use it to make 3D Scans of people or objects! Normally this is done by a lot of high quality cameras all around the subject but with this only one good quality camera is needed. Attach it to the drone and write a code, that the drone flies around the subject and takes photos from different angles. With the gyro and tracking data you can create awesome 3D Scans!
I'd love to see someone doing this because I have got no clue how to start ... 😅
Thank you for sharing this video. I especially like the systems-level thinking and diagram, and good job to get those complicated nested PID loops working. The math shown for bundle-adjustment minimizing reprojection error is something I didn't know before, it is very useful, I appreciated learning it from the video.
If you need to track more than 6 points and they start to overlap you could try to synchronize timers so they're not all on all at once. The esp32 has a real time clock, so you may be able to synchronize several drones to be down to the millisecond with each other (you synchronize it with a physical pin you keep reading, then physically connect them all and synchronize them with one signal at the same time), and then turn them on and off in a certain pattern (so once you have synchronized the seconds the ones that are on for 000-005 ms after each second is the first light, the one that is on 005-010 is the second light, and so forth, and once you've got them all the pattern repeats - they turn on at their assigned time. Think of it like one of them shows up on the hour for five minutes, one each :05 to :10 past the hour, and so forth, only it's milliseconds not minutes and also it repeats, they just don't fire at the same time. It works as long as you can synchronize the clocks and they're high-resolution enough. This way they drones are way easier to tell apart.
The number of drones you can handle one at a time this way depends on your camera's framerate. This works because speed of light is really fast so as long as you synchronize ahead of time and have a good real time clock you can figure out which is which, and you do mention the camera has a really high frame-rate. The CV system has a latency in it so you should have one of the lights turn on on exactly on the second every second for a different number of milliseconds from the others, so by looking for that length you can figure out what that latency is. This will require you to track how long the beacons have been on but it should not be too difficult. The CV system's latency is fixed usually, so you should be able to do this. Try it.
For milspec applications they could use a super high resolution timer and synchronize real time clocks down to the nanoseconds (my DM's are open, DoD) and keep track of up to tens of thousands of drones through high resolution cameras, but milliseconds is good for your $20 system and could get you to twenty drones or so without the spots interfering with each other and without adding too much latency.
I'd love to know if you are able to try it, let me know.
Great work. Not easy to navigate all of those different protocols and stitch something like this together. Also great triangulation algorithm work. We need more bright and talented engineers like yourself. Thanks for making the project open source so that others can be inspired and have some assistance to build something great too
I strive to be this knowledgeable!
This is an incredible video. I love it. This is a project I would love to tackle myself in the future.
Joshua my friend, you sertanly are an architect. Amigo Joshua, SOS un arquitecto
this is what i have been looking for... very thankful for the share...
Amazing project and it's obvious that a lot of effort has gone into it nice work
Thank you for sharing. I loved it!
damn I have never clicked on the sub button as fast as I just did. Youre doing incredibly cool stuff man and I would love to be a part of this interesting mind of yours!
This is amazing! Deserves more attention
A good next step could be to use your own firmware on the drones. Providing a series of inputs to the controller via the PWM signals which results in a sort of nested PID loops like you discussed can make it difficult for precise movements, but if you are able to have custom firmware work out motor speeds in order to optimize moving the drone through a path in space, you can have them zip around in patterns in the most optimal way. Could also train a neural net to do this as well, rather than needing outputs for pitch, yaw, roll and throttle which translate to flight controller, the neural net would directly control the motor speeds through a series of waypoints
I subscribed and will be following your journey every step of the way. please continue making this content!
I was looking for position system and found this awesome video. Thanks for the detailed information.
This is amazing work, explained with great clarity as well!
amazing project! The camera pose logic will help me a lot in a different project I'm working right now. Thank you very much for sharing
this is the kind of video that deserve my like , good work bro
When you eventually get your first million subscribers, I'll be able to tell people that I was one of your first 5000
Super cool to see all processes you had to learn. awesome job
Thats awesome bro. I love this new drone technology and where people are taking it to! 👍🏻👍🏻
Holy shit this is insane. Keep it up man the views will catch up
Awesome work! I am currently creating my own drone. Goodluck with everything. Thanks for sharing!
bro just made dji's function that cheap! mind blowing
Bravo! that is amazing work. You have inspired me to tinker with drones again. :-) look forward to seeing more of your work in the future.
Yep, this kid is going places!
Incredible. I am currently thinking of doing something like this too. This is going to be a great help to me.
Thanks :)
This is wonderful! You've my support in your endeavours!
This is an impressive project yo! While interning at Palantir? Damn! You're a horse 🐎!
I just stumbled upon your video on Open Source Motion Capture for Autonomous Drones, and I have to say, I am absolutely blown away! 🚀 The level of innovation and creativity showcased in this video is truly remarkable.
The way you explained the concept behind motion capture and how it can be applied to drones with open-source software was incredibly insightful. I appreciate how you broke down the technical aspects into easily digestible information, making it accessible even for someone like me who doesn't have a background in robotics or coding.
The visuals in the video were top-notch as well. The way you demonstrated how motion capture technology enables precise flight control in autonomous drones was mind-boggling. It's amazing to see how far drone technology has come and how it continues to revolutionize various industries.
But what really stood out for me was your passion throughout the video. Your excitement about this technology shines through, and it is infectious. You made a complex topic so engaging that I couldn't help but watch the entire video with total fascination.
Thank you for sharing such incredible content on your TH-cam channel. Your dedication to delivering informative yet entertaining videos sets you apart from others in this space. Keep up the fantastic work, and know that there are fans like me eagerly waiting for more captivating videos!
Chatgpt answer?
@@sebastianortmann4728… dude I thought the same thing. After a while you start to recognize the gippity prose.
yes ı create my own gpt for web browser . its direcly writes comment . ı just say what ı mention to say . but thats gpt answer didnt mean i dont care you . ı just not very good at english as well as ı want . ı love you and ı love your creations . keep going . love from turkey @@sebastianortmann4728 💗
@@patricknelson yeeeah i feel the same 😅
This is insanely good !!!!