Automated drone-based calibration for large OptiTrack camera volumes.
This project gives OptiTrack operators a way to calibrate large camera volumes — sports fields, multi-story buildings, and other spaces too big or too tall for a person to wand by hand — by sending a drone through the space instead.
Manual calibration of a large volume is slow, hard to reproduce, and sometimes physically impossible. Walking a calibration wand across a 100-meter field or up several stories of scaffolding is exhausting at best and unsafe at worst, and any inconsistency in coverage shows up as worse tracking accuracy.
By having a drone fly a defined trajectory while carrying a calibration rod, the same volume can be calibrated repeatably, with full coverage, without putting a person in the space. The flight path can be saved and re-flown the next time the volume needs to be re-checked.
- Qt-based waypoint editor. Operators sketch and edit the drone's flight path through the volume in a desktop UI — no scripting, no flight-controller knowledge required.
- Record and replay calibration runs. Once a trajectory works for a given room or field, it can be saved and re-flown on demand whenever the volume needs to be re-calibrated.
- Calibration-rod handling with Motive integration. The drone carries the calibration rod through the volume and coordinates start/stop with OptiTrack Motive, so calibration data lands in the same workflow operators already use.
- Onboard SLAM mapping. The drone builds a live map of the space as it flies, so operators can see the volume the drone has covered and confirm the calibration trajectory matches the real environment.
Figure 1 — The Qt waypoint editor: operators place and edit waypoints to define the drone's calibration trajectory.
Figure 2 — Live SLAM map produced by the drone as it flies, showing the volume covered during a calibration run.
Interactive 3D model of the calibration drone — view at the GitHub Pages site to rotate and inspect.
Figure 3 — Interactive 3D model of the calibration drone (drag to rotate; scroll to zoom). Visible on the GitHub Pages version of this README.
This is a research and development project; there is no installable build yet. To see how it works:
- View the source on GitHub — browse the Qt UI (
qt-drone-ui/) and the on-drone programs (voxl-programs/).
System requirements:
- OptiTrack Motive (for the camera volume being calibrated)
- A VOXL-based drone (the on-drone software lives in
voxl-programs/) - Qt, to run the desktop control UI
This is an Oregon State University capstone project, developed in collaboration with NaturalPoint Inc. DBA OptiTrack.
- Cohen Velazquez — velazquc@oregonstate.edu
- Parthiv Nair — nairp@oregonstate.edu
- Bryan Chen — chenbry@oregonstate.edu
- Andrew Nolke — nolkea@oregonstate.edu
For questions or feedback, email any of the team members above.
All non-third-party code in this repository is jointly owned by the team listed above and NaturalPoint Inc. DBA OptiTrack. See LICENSE.txt in the licenses/ folder for full terms; third-party licenses are in the same folder, named accordingly.