The Open Vision Computer: An Integrated Sensing and Compute System for Mobile Robots
This work addresses the problem of size, weight, power, and computational constraints for mobile robots, particularly drones, but it is incremental as it builds on existing sensing and compute integration approaches.
The authors tackled the challenge of enabling high-speed, vision-guided autonomous drone flight by developing the Open Vision Computer (OVC), an integrated sensing and compute system designed for small-scale flying platforms, and demonstrated its use in fully autonomous indoor and outdoor exploration and navigation on a Falcon 250 quadrotor.
In this paper we describe the Open Vision Computer (OVC) which was designed to support high speed, vision guided autonomous drone flight. In particular our aim was to develop a system that would be suitable for relatively small-scale flying platforms where size, weight, power consumption and computational performance were all important considerations. This manuscript describes the primary features of our OVC system and explains how they are used to support fully autonomous indoor and outdoor exploration and navigation operations on our Falcon 250 quadrotor platform.