VIO drone
Visual-inertial odometry for an autonomous drone, so it can hold position without GPS.
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Robotics Software Engineer
- Stack
- ROS2, PX4, MAVLink, MAVSDK, Intel RealSense D435i, Jetson Orin Nano
A drone that flies indoors has no GPS. It needs another way to know where it is, or the flight controller cannot hold a stable position.
This system gives a custom drone visual-inertial odometry. It combines images from an Intel RealSense D435i camera with data from an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The result is a pose estimate: the position and orientation of the drone.
The code runs on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano and uses ROS2. The D435i is a depth camera. It has no built-in tracking, so the pose estimate comes from software. A MAVLink link sends the pose to the PX4 flight controller in real time. This closes the loop for onboard navigation.
A telemetry stream, built with CMake, MAVLink, and MAVSDK, sends the flight data back from the drone.