OmniNxt: A Fully Open-source and Compact Aerial Robot with Omnidirectional Visual Perception

IROS 2024 Oral
Peize Liu, Chen Feng^†, Yang Xu, Yan Ning, Hao Xu^†, and Shaojie Shen

HKUST Aerial Robotics Group   
^†Corresponding Authors

📢News

• [30/06/2024]: OmniNxt is accepted to IROS 2024.
• [15/08/2024] V0.1 Release

Outline

[TOC]

🤖Build your own OmniNxt

You should have basic knowledge of the standard quadrotor's electronic system.

BOM

🧰Component	📏 Specification	🔗 Purchase Link
Quad-Fisheye Camera Set
OAK-FFC-4P	Camera control board	Official / Taobao
B0335 (OV9782)	Camera modules (Fisheye lens FOV larger than 210 degrees)	Official / Taobao
Camera cables	Customized	Camera cable SCH
Onboard computer
Jetson Orin Nx
Jetson Orin Nx carrier board		DM
Jetson Orin Nx radiator
Jeston Orin Network card
2230 SSD
Intel AX200
Flight platforms (6S)
Nxt-FC	Project Page	MicoAir / Taobao
Flight frame	Customized	Fusion360
Protector	Customized / Oddity RC XI35 protector	Fusion360 / Oddity RC
Motors	2204 1750KV/ 1804 2450KV
6S Battery

Our latest design can be accessed by Fusion360.🔗Link Access code: hkustUAV

Multi-fisheye Camera Module

ROS wrap driver 🔗oak_ffc_4p, which contains hardware information, ROS1 driver and test tools.

Calibration tool 🔗 quater-calib

Jetson Orin

Environment Info

We suggest you follow these settings to avoid conflict (especially CUDA and TensorRT).

Nxt-FC

We open-source hardware designs at 🔗NXT-FC. Nxt-FC supports PX4 and Ardupilot firmware.

Follow the instructions for setting up the Nxt-FC part to configure your flight controller.

The PX4 parameter of OmniNxt can be downloaded from Onedrive.

💾Runtime setup

Our Omni-VINS and Omni-Depth are developed from D2SLAM. Since building the Docker images on the local machine(Jetson Orin) usually takes a long time, we suggest you pull the images from the Docker Hub. If you want to build the Docker image on your local machine, follow the instructions [Build Docker Images On Local Machine](#Build Docker images in local machines).

the docker images structure is as follows:

Step 1 Clone the repository into your local machine

git clone --branch pr_fix_main https://github.com/HKUST-Aerial-Robotics/D2SLAM.git

Step 2 Configure your quad-cam parameters and VINS parameters following our template

cd ./D2SLAM/config/quadcam_drone_nxt_tmp

If you have already calibrated your quad fisheye camera set, you can simply replace the files with the same name, which includes:

1. stereo_calib_n_m_240_320.yaml (n and m is the camera number; used in Omni-Depth).
2. fisheye_cams.yaml. (used in Omni-VINS)

Step 3 Configure ./start_docker.sh script with your local environment.

./start_docker.sh is under the ./D2SLAM directory.

Modify the following parameters with the absolute path under your local host environment.

1. DATA_SET (where the data set is) (Optional)

Then run with the following command under the D2SLAM directory (very important, this will map your D2SLAM dir into the container)：

./start_docker.sh 1

Step 4 Launch algorithm modules

run all algorithm modules together (Omni-VINS & Omni-Depth)

## you should under /root/swarm_ws/
source ./devel/setup.bash
roslaunch d2vins quadcam.laucnh

Only launch Omni-VINS. Please remove the nodes in the red box

source ./devel/setup.bash
roslaunch d2vins quadcam.laucnh

Only launch Omni-Depth

source ./devel/setup.bash
roslaunch quadcam_depth_est depth-node.launch

[Notice] If you are running Omni-VINS and Omni-Depth for the first time, the initialization process of these two modules would be a little bit long because of the building of the inference engine.

Almost done

If everything works well, you will see

which means Omni-VINS(D2VINS) initialized normally.

Omni-Depth

🖥️Build Docker images in local machines

Step 1 Build Jeston_base image

cd /D2SLA/docker
make jetson_orin_base

Step 2 Build Jeston Orin image

cd /D2SLA/docker
make jetson_orin

PX4 Controller

We highly suggest you refer to Fast-Lab's PX4 controller PX4-Control

We also provide our yaw-rotation-free version of Fast-Lab's PX4 controller PX4-Control.

Please cite ZJU-Fast-Lab if these modules are useful for your research and project.

Flight planer

We modified some of the strategies in the ego-planner. Our version is here ego-planner-omni-modify

Please cite ZJU-Fast-Lab's ego-planner if these modules are useful for your research and project.

🔧Troubleshooting

💯Acknowledgment