PIXHAWK: Open Source Micro Air Vehicle Computer Vision at ETH Zurich

It took a while, but we have now compiled the development of spring semester 2009 and the 1st place in the EMAV 2009 competition in a new video!

While we're pushing towards a first public release of our open-source computer vision and robotics toolkit for micro air vehicles, we're also publishing about our work. The first step is a poster about the PIXHAWK Pioneer system we used to win the EMAV 2009 Indoor Autonomy Competition. We present it this afternoon at the poster session of the CogSys 2010 conference in Zurich, including our OMAP3530 based coaxial computer vision helicopter.

We made good progress over the last semester, with some important steps regarding our vision pipeline and a complete new electronics generation coming up. We managed to shrink our previous design significantly down, regarding size, weight, costs and number of PCBs as well as part count.

The new electronics is assembled and currently in testing, we'll introduce it via the developer's blog once it's running with the new onboard software.

And last but not least: We're also recruiting new students for the PIXHAWK 3.0 team in 2010!

After the EMAV2009 competition is now over for quite some time and IMAV2010 is on the horizon, it is time for a general update and some announcements. We have analysed what could be improved on the system and a new generation of students is already working on these improvements since two months.

While we're currently working on natural features based navigation, we're also improving our ARToolkit based localization technique.

Regarding the coaxial platform, there are also a number of improvements: The electronics was downsized by ~60%, reducing the weight from 50 to about 15-25g. And we have developed custom I2C motor controllers for the two coaxial rotors, as the typical RC controllers don't offer the precision we need.

The website was also slightly improved, but the big improvement dates already back to the summer: Our team logo, which was not yet officially presented, although we already used it at EMAV. It was designed by Ralph Wiedemeier.

Last but not least a note on our new rotary wing platform: We will soon introduce a much bigger platform offering an order of magnitude more processing power, which will run the same software and can also use the same electronics. It will be used in parallel to the (then even more downsized) current platform - but more on that in early 2010.

We are now providing an ARM v7a (including NEON) compiler and disassembly webservice to allow convenient testing of highly optimized code chunks. The webservice allows to select several optimization flags for GCC (including enabling NEON instructions) to see how they affect the machine instructions. The output is then the machine instructions to be executed by the processor. Optimizing code up to the limit of machine instructions is nontrivial, so we hope to offer some insight with this service.

Link to Generator

This is the system we actually used in our winning entry in EMAV2009! It is named <PIXHAWK Pioneer> to point out that this is the first system of many more to follow. We had only six months to finish the whole design, including the mechanical frame, sensor electronics and computer vision software.

The design is quite similar to the prototype shown a few weeks ago, but now offers enough space to mount all components in the 'safety cage' to prevent damage in case of a crash. Although we had some severe crashes in the meantime, neither the frame nor components suffered any damage.

The software will be, as promised, available soon as well as the CAD and EDA files. We're currently cleaning the documentation and include any changes that we think are necessary to make the system usable.

We will also work on improving the system for the summer 2010 competitions and we're also looking into some experimental ideas regarding new electronics and hardware.

Are you ETH student and interested in joining the project? There are still open semester/bachelor/master thesises in the fields of flight control (waypoints), CAD (for a new, experimental MAV and for the coaxial helicopter) and computer vision. More details:

Students: Join the EMAV team!