Visual odometry for drone's navigation

[Concept]

Considering a drone is currently at a position P(i), at time step i. A waypoint to be achieved at the next time step is W(i+1)

1. Calculating position error between W(i+1) and P(i).
2. Position error fed into a PID controller that generates a velocity command V(i).
3. Calculating velocity error between V(i) and current velocity from visual odometry algorithm.
4. Velocity error fed into another PID controller to get an appropriate roll, pitch, yaw and throttle outputs.

Reference:
[1] Strydom, Reuben, Saul Thurrowgood, and Mandyam V. Srinivasan. "Visual odometry: autonomous uav navigation using optic flow and stereo." Proceedings of Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation. 2014.

[Intel AERO]

Connecting Lidar Lite Range Finder:

• https://github.com/intel-aero/aero-optical-flow
• https://docs.px4.io/en/flight_controller/intel_aero.html

ROS:

• 05-Autonomous-drone-programming-with-ROS
• http://wiki.ros.org/rtabmap_ros ( Section: Stereo Outdoor Navigation )
• how-to-use-rovio

Data base available:

• http://www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti/raw_data.php
• Introduce