A general purpose motion capture system built from the ground up, used to autonomously fly multiple drones indoors
Watch this for information about the project & a demo! https://youtu.be/0ql20JKrscQ?si=jkxyOe-iCG7fa5th
Install the pseyepy python library: https://github.com/bensondaled/pseyepy
This project requires the sfm (structure from motion) OpenCV module, which requires you to compile OpenCV from source1. This is a bit of a pain, but these links should help you get started: SFM dependencies OpenCV module installation guide
install npm and yarn
From the computer_code directory Run yarn install to install node dependencies
Then run yarn run dev to start the webserver. You will be given a url view the frontend interface.
In another terminal window, run python3 api/index.py to start the backend server. This is what receives the camera streams and does motion capture computations.
The documentation for this project is admittedly pretty lacking, if anyone would like to put type definitions in the Python code that would be amazing and probably go a long way to helping the readability of the code. Feel free to also use the discussion tab to ask questions.
My blog post has some more information about the drones & camera: joshuabird.com/blog/post/mocap-drones
This post by gumby0q explains how camera_params.json can be calculated for your cameras.
This motion capture system is an "outside-in" system, with external cameras tracking objects within a fixed space. There are also "inside-out" systems which use cameras on the drones/robots to determine their locations, not requiring any external infrastructure.
My undergraduate dissertation presents such a system, which is capable of localizing multiple agents within a world in real time using purely visual data, with state-of-the-art performance. Check it out here: https://github.com/jyjblrd/distributed_visual_SLAM
