OmniNxt: A Fully Open-Source and Compact Aerial Robot with Omnidirectional Visual Perception

Adopting omnidirectional Field of View (FoV) cameras in aerial robots vastly improves perception ability, significantly advancing aerial robotics’s capabilities in inspec- tion, reconstruction, and rescue tasks. However, such sensors also elevate system complexity, e.g., hardware design, and cor- responding algorithm, which limits researchers from utilizing aerial robots with omnidirectional FoV in their research. To bridge this gap, we propose OmniNxt, a fully open-source aerial robotics platform with omnidirectional perception. We design a high-performance flight controller Nxt-FC and a multi-fisheye camera set for OmniNxt. Meanwhile, the compatible software is carefully devised, which empowers OmniNxt to achieve accurate localization and real-time dense mapping with limited computation resource occupancy. We conducted extensive real- world experiments to validate the superior performance of OmniNxt in practical applications. All the hardware and This work was supported in part by the Research Grants Council General Research Fund (RGCGRF) project RMGS20EG20, and in part by the HKUST-DJI Joint Innovation Laboratory. 1Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China. 2Division of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas, The Hong Kong Univer- sity of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China. Email: {pliuan,cfengag,yxuew,yningaa,hxubc}@ust.hk, eeshaojie@ust.hk Corresponding Authors software are open-access at3, and we provide docker images of each crucial module in the proposed system. Project page: https://hkust-aerial-robotics.github.io/OmniNxt.