Results
Here the final results of the dissertation are presented.
The developed framework was built upon the principle of "divide and conquer" in that each module provides separate and independent information that is later used either for navigation or location estimation.
Overall, the video stabilization method worked as intended by simply compensating strong oscillations occurring in the video feed while preserving the original video when no compensation was required.
The vanishing point detection method works flawlessly which leads to a satisfactory navigation orientation for the drone. Even in situations where an invalid vanishing point is detected, either by external interferences (e.g posters hanged in the walls) or by the lack of visual information available, this module is able to compensate these disparities by either using Kalman filters to smooth the oscillation of the detected vanishing point or evaluating the time period during which the vanishing point is not detected: for safety reasons, if the detection is interrupted, the drone will hover and wait for another set of valid detections and, if it takes too much time to do so, the drone will land.
The door detection method works as expected, detecting the doors when they are in close proximity to the drone. By making use of the information from both door detections methods, recessed door detection and contour door detection , as well as temporal information to avoid invalid sequential detections, a robust and coherent door detection module was created.
The position estimation module proved to work as intended by using all the information pro- vided by the other modules and using it, alongside the pre-coded map, to estimate the position of the drone as well as the detected doors.
Although some problems were detected with the different modules, which in some situations would bleed through to other modules, precautions were taken so that the modules could work even in the most unfavourable situations. In the following video, both simulations and flight experiments are shown.
