Optical flow for indoor positioning in Drone Programming - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Optical flow for indoor positioning

📖 Scenario: You are programming a small indoor drone to help it know how it moves inside a room. The drone uses a camera to see the floor and calculates how much it has moved by looking at the changes in the floor pattern. This is called optical flow.We will write a simple program that takes a list of movement vectors detected by the camera and calculates the drone's total movement inside the room.

🎯 Goal: Build a program that sums up the optical flow vectors to find the drone's total movement in the X and Y directions inside a room.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list of optical flow vectors with exact values

Add a variable to hold the total movement initialized to zero

Use a for loop to sum the X and Y movements separately

Print the total movement as a tuple (total_x, total_y)

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Indoor drones use optical flow to understand how they move without GPS. This helps them fly safely inside buildings.

💼 Career

Understanding optical flow and vector summing is important for drone programmers and robotics engineers working on navigation systems.

1

Create the optical flow data

Create a list called optical_flow_vectors with these exact tuples representing movement: (1, 2), (-1, 3), (0, -2), (2, 1).

Drone Programming

# Create the list optical_flow_vectors with the given tuples
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets to create a list and put the tuples inside separated by commas.

2

Set up total movement variables

Create two variables called total_x and total_y and set both to 0 to hold the total movement in X and Y directions.

Drone Programming

optical_flow_vectors = [(1, 2), (-1, 3), (0, -2), (2, 1)]
# Create total_x and total_y variables set to 0
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use simple assignment to create variables and set them to zero.

3

Sum the optical flow vectors

Use a for loop with variables dx and dy to iterate over optical_flow_vectors. Inside the loop, add dx to total_x and dy to total_y.

Drone Programming

optical_flow_vectors = [(1, 2), (-1, 3), (0, -2), (2, 1)]
total_x = 0
total_y = 0
# Use a for loop to sum dx and dy into total_x and total_y
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a for loop to get each tuple and add the parts to total_x and total_y.

4

Print the total movement

Write a print statement to display the total movement as a tuple: (total_x, total_y).

Drone Programming

optical_flow_vectors = [(1, 2), (-1, 3), (0, -2), (2, 1)]
total_x = 0
total_y = 0
for dx, dy in optical_flow_vectors:
    total_x += dx
    total_y += dy
# Print the total movement tuple
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print() with parentheses around total_x and total_y to show the tuple.