Balloon Bundle Adjuster

Detects and estimated the position of red and blue balloons using GPS and Bundle Adjustment.

Requirements

• Eigen
• OpenCV
• Google Ceres

Build and Run

First, copy balloon images and their corresponding poses into the images directory. Then build and run:

mkdir build-release
cd build-release
cmake ..
make -j4
./BalloonBundleAdjuster

Reference Frames

Camera frame

• Origin - Center of image
• Z - Along boresight
• Y - Down
• X - Right

Quad

• Origin - Center of primary GPS antenna
• Z - Up
• Y - Left
• X - Forward

Inertial (ENU)

• Origin - On top of the chimney
• Z - Up
• Y - North
• X - East

Notation

Rotation Matrix vs Direction Cosine Matrix

To dispell ambiguity, I make a distinction between Rotation Matrices and Direction Cosine Matrices.

Rotation matrices describe how frame B is rotated away from frame A as viewed from frame A. The columns of the rotation matrix R can be interpreted as the unit vectors of B as viewed in frame A. A rotation of frame B away from frame A is denoted by 'RBA'.

Direction cosine matrices are operators that take a vector expressed in frame A and express it in frame B. Direction cosine matrices are denoted by 'DA2B'.