Quadrotor Helicopter Flight Control Using Hough Transform and Depth Map from a Microsoft Kinect Sensor

Abstract

Reliable depth estimation is important to many autonomous robotic systems and visual control algorithms. The Microsoft Kinect is a new, low cost game controller peripheral that calculates a depth map of the environment with good accuracy and high rate. In this paper we use the calibrated output of the depth sensor to obtain an accurate absolute depth map. Subsequently by using a Randomized Hough Transform to detect the ground plane in this depth map we are able to autonomously hover a quadrotor helicopter. 1