Labbook IMAV

Started Labbook 2024.

December 5, 2023

For next year's budget, the Duckiedrone DD21 of 300 euro's could be an option.
The corresponding course textbook can be found here.
The course consists of 5 projects, the last two UKF and SLAM. The UKF-2D is a height-speed estimation.
The 3rd project is a middleware assignment also interesting for the Advanced Robotics course: Reading TOF messages with ROS. The measurements have to be aggrgated in a 10-second window calculating mean and variance.
Also funn are the affine transformations to calculate the correspondence between two images from a different location (but the same height).
The AI Drone Racing article is published in the August 2023 version of IEEE (which is actually in the green cabinet)

Shanghai Tech University has a software page with event camera datasets and software.

The software suite from Inivation can be installed from here. A ppa repository for 18.04, 20.04 and 22.04 LTS is available.
There also exist a ros dvs package, which should work for DAVIS camera's. The package is based on libcaer from inivation. On their libcaer is only mentioned related to synchronization. Libcaer can still be found on gitlab, together with several other projects (including dv-stereo-slam) and dv-ros. The capture_node replaces the individual nodes davis_ros_driver, dvs_ros_driver, and dvxplorer_ros_driver.
Note that for dv-stereo-slam two DVXplorer Lite are needed (2x 2200 euro) and a mounting plate of 80 euro.
Should read Event-based Stereo Visual Odometry

Looks like that Samsung is no longer building DVS cameras.
Also the iniVation Duo is gone, but the DVXplorer mini is still a good choice.
Looking in the product page of Prophesee.
The Imago camera was not yet in Event-based vision: A Survey
Seems to be introduced in 2019, but I don't see USB-3 interface.
Their latest sensor seems to be EVK4, developed together with Sony. At least this camera has a USB-3 connection, IX synchronisation and a 1280x720px resolution.
Looked into IX synchronisation. Looks like there are several plugs, and IX supports the GigE vision interface standard.
According to this page, type A is for internet, and type B for signals and serial BUS systems, which could be coupled to D-sub mating (while type A could be assembled with a RJ45 counterpart).
The pin layout is actually quite hard to find, the best overview I found in Harting Ethernet cabling livebook (page 10), which indicates that IX is RJ45 with two additional pins (3 and 8).
The camera is supported with Metavision SDK.
Could already try the tutorial with on of the sample dataset. Yet, those are at best Gen4.1 based, do not see a sample of the new EVK4 sensor yet.
The open-source version of the code is available on github.
The warning is that the test-file is 1.2 Gb.