Bitcraze Forums

Hi! A group of my university adopted this proyect and I just joined them. I'm going to work in the part related to image processing and I would like some advice or guidance with respect of what tools should I use, I am kind of new to all this stuff so Im trying to catch up as fast as I can. I am supossed to work with the Kinect and I intend to control it throug this mean, so the quadcopter can know where it is and where to go (human controlled), avoid crashing with obstacles (self controlled) and these sort of things. So the real questions are:

1.- What tools do yo recomend? I've reading about OpenCV and Visual Studio, what about using it with matlab?

2.- What else could I try to develop besides just controlling it indoor and crash avoidance.

Would appreciate a lot your help, thanks!

1. OpenCV + OpenNI are good choices. If you don't like C++, you can use python bindings instead. I would not recommend using Matlab for that - that is just not a domain where Matlab is great at (would be mainly control flow). If you want to get fancy you can use Linux + Robot Operating System (ROS).
2. This is hard enough... I don't think you will need more tasks for a while!

Oh thanks, I think I'll try OpenCV + OpenNI, they seem to be just right for the task... And that about using python binding sounds good too. Well, it looks like I got a lot of work to do, thanks a lot! Until later.

Hi Im back again, I finally put my hands to work in my proyect. Im using Visual Studio, OpenCV and Windows 7. it is going well with the image processing, now the problem is that i have no idea how connect my image processing software to the crazyflie plataform and be able to control the quadcopter through the camera. As i mentioned before I am pretty new to all of these. hope i explained myself well enough and would appreciate any help and advice.

If you are using C++, it might be easiest to use libcflie (https://github.com/fairlight1337/libcflie, there are other forks available as well). If you use python you can use the official Bitcraze SDK.

You could also have a look at this blog post and this page on the wiki for the latest work that we have done with the Kinect v2.