Autonomous Quadrotor Using Google's Project Tango

I posed about project tango from google a couple months ago, which is a mobile device with depth sensor, along with a motion tracking camera along with two vision processors.

Some guys form University of Pennsylvania have now used it on a quadcopter! The cool thing about this, it that its one of the few quadcopters that does all the processing onboard. Most indoor quadcopters need a laptop to do most of the computation. The video is shown below.

The only measurement from the Tango phone is its pose, which is the position plus orientation with reference to a starting coordinate system (captured at a rate of 30 Hz), and the only other sensor used is the IMU onboard the drone. (The laptop is not controlling flight autonomy in any way; it’s only used to send a desired trajectory to the drone and to render a visualization of the its positions in space).

For more details you can read the IEEE article here