The Open Vision Computer: An Integrated Sensing and Compute System for Mobile Robots

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Open Vision Computer, a compact, efficient system integrating sensing and computing to enable high-speed, autonomous drone navigation in indoor and outdoor environments.

Contribution

It presents the design and implementation of the Open Vision Computer, tailored for small-scale drones requiring lightweight, power-efficient, and high-performance vision processing.

Findings

Supports autonomous indoor and outdoor exploration

Enables high-speed vision-guided drone flight

Optimized for size, weight, and power constraints

Abstract

In this paper we describe the Open Vision Computer (OVC) which was designed to support high speed, vision guided autonomous drone flight. In particular our aim was to develop a system that would be suitable for relatively small-scale flying platforms where size, weight, power consumption and computational performance were all important considerations. This manuscript describes the primary features of our OVC system and explains how they are used to support fully autonomous indoor and outdoor exploration and navigation operations on our Falcon 250 quadrotor platform.