Motion Tracking for Dynamic Analysis of Jumping and Flying Robots

The development of small, active robots is built around an iterative process of design, modeling, an d verification. Accurate knowledge of vehicle position and velocity is crucial to verification, and so is essential for closing the l oop of this iterative process. In this paper we present a meth od for detecting robust fiducials from a video of a robot moving in the image plane. We combine image processing techniques with an understanding of basic physical principles to first identify approximate robot location and then discover the mo st robust fiducial visible for at least 90% of the video. Keywords—robotics; MAVs; motion tracking; dynamics