OpenMV as AHRS for indoor drones

[Simon Wood]

Hi all,
Discovered OpenMV (and micropython) recently and must say it looks mighty impressive. If I understand correctly you are soon going to be marketing a camera that the 'masses' can purchase....   am particularly interested on whether this camera could assist with position hold for indoor drones.

At present there are a few AHRS projects which use a combination of Accel/Gyros/Magnometers coupled with GPS, to allow position hold and waypoint navigation. Obviously GPS isn't really usable in an indoor situation. I am wondering whether the image tracking capabilities of OpenMV could be used (along with additional Acc/Gyros) to detect specially placed markers (Datamatrix/etc) around the perimeter of a room.

I note from the schems for V2 there are UARTs and a SPI bus pulled out to the headers. Is there any chance that a second SPI can be configured (pin-mux'ed) and be brought out (if only to test points)? If not I can probably prototype directly onto chip legs.


In terms of tracking what's the state of play? One of the videos on you-tube had some barcodes (format?) stuck on the wall, is the camera detecting/tracking these?


I have some previous experience (1) with libdmtx (2) (datamatrix library which has python bindings), and might be faster than the Open-CV equivalent. Libdmtx also outputs the corner locations of the barcode(s) in the image, so would be usable for triangulation.

Cheers,
Simon

1). http://sourceforge.net/projects/pydmscanner/
2). http://libdmtx.org/