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Payloads

Onboard

Potential options:

  • Companion computer -- to run your control layer locally and relay telemetry data/state.
  • Gimbal -- Gremsy is a popular choice for tweaking camera orientation mid-flight.

Cameras

  • Cameras -- Sony ILX-LR1 is camera built specifically for mapping with a manual shutter, 1/8000 shutter speed, a 61MP sensor and an ISO range of 100-32000.
  • Infrared sensors -- Teledyne makes sensors used in many popular drones.
  • Lidar -- By observing patterned laser light across a space, we can calculate the orientation and distance of any reflections. This is valuable for 3D imagery and terrain detection. Range scales at ~1/N^3, which means that
  • Radar -- We can embed low-cost millimeter wave radar and use this to estimate distance. This is often used to estimate distance to the ground or detect collisions with objects in our flight path.
  • Optical flow -- this employs computer vision to estimate velocity by computing the amount of pixel change and by extension distance using a pinhole camera.