October 2016
Intermediate to advanced
222 pages
5h 26m
English
Content preview from Make: Drones
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Chapter 21. Optical Flow, Sonar, and Lidar
Technology moves ever forward. The $150,000 GPS receivers of the 1980s have become the $15 pucks that we navigate our drones by. And while they can’t do everything those military-grade receivers did, they work much better on the whole.
Similarly, sensors (and the processing power necessary to use them) that were once the exclusive domain of top-secret military projects can now be integrated into our drones. The hardware vendors trade open source designs to keep costs down, and the open source software communities work constantly to support the latest gadgets.
In this chapter, we’ll look at several new technologies that are finding their way into drone projects today—optical flow sensors (Figure 21-1 ...