Five students in PSU’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Capstone sequence want to show you what they’ve created: an inexpensive computer vision system for a quadcopter running on a Raspberry Pi board. One might be surprised how simple it is to code a decent object tracking algorithm using open-source software, and how difficult it is to keep a quadcopter from crashing into the wall in the debug stage. This talk should appeal to the RC hobbyist, the embedded systems programmer, and anyone interested in the art of computer vision. The presentation will include video footage of what these students have accomplished and how they pulled it off.

Presented by Pat Hickey.

At Galois, we're building critical flight control software using new software methods for embedded systems programming. We will show how we used new domain-specific languages which permit low-level hardware manipulation while still providing guarantees of type and memory safety. The flagship application for these new languages is called SMACCMPilot, a clean slate design of quadcopter flight control software built on open-source hardware. This talk will introduce our new software methods and show how we built SMACCMPilot to be high assurance without sacrificing programmer productivity.