Fly a Multicopter using an Immersive Virtual Realiy Setup

Bachelor Thesis

About This Topic

Multicopters have become popular and wide spread in recent years. While consumer hardware is still manually controlled by a pilot using a standard remote control, there is a lot of potential for improved copter piloting by applying intuitive control metaphors.

To achieve this, a quadcopter will be equipped with a stereo camera rig that data is streamed over a wifi connection to a workstation. Next, the vision data is displayed within a head mounted display to allow for egocentric view of the copter's flight path. In addition, the copter's attitude is controlled by tracking the pilot's head orientation and sending it to the on-board flight platform. Thereby, an intuitive attitude control can be achieved.

Within this thesis, the quadcopter is designed and equipped with off the shelf stereo cameras and embedded hardware for flight control. Software module are developed that allow for communication, image data streaming, immersive scene view and copter control using the user's head orientation.

The topic is ideal to gain a deeper understanding in immersive virtual reality, multi-view imaging, IMU tracking and robotics.

Programming: C/C++, C#

SDKs/Platforms: Unity3D, Oculus Rift, Rasberry Pi, Arduino