The vision pod shown above is mounted to the front of the helicopter and houses three FireWire cameras. The central camera can be fitted with a standard lens for downwards looking applications, or with an omnidirectional lens, as shown here. The center camera is a MicroPix C-1024 FireWire camera (Color, 10 Bits, 1024x768 @ 15fps) which is coupled with  a NetVision Omnidirectional lens from Remote Reality. The sideways looking cameras are iBOT FireWire webcams (Color, 640x480 @ 30fps), with 190° FOV fisheye lenses from Omnitech Robotics. A Microstrain 3DM-G IMU is mounted to the pod for measuring the motion of the cameras independently of the helicopter's motion.

 

Vision PC/104 Stack

In addition to the flight control PC/104 stack onboard the helicopter, a second PC/104 stack (running Linux) is used for running the vision code. The stack consists of a Tri-M HESC-104 Power supply, Tiny886ULP 800Mhz Crusoe based processor board from Advances Micro Peripherals, FireSpeed2000 Firewire Controller board  from Advances Micro Peripherals, M-Systems 256MB solid state hard drive, PCMCIA card adapter, Orinoco PCMCIA 802.11b wireless card, and a 1GB IBM Microdrive.