At the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency, we have just released an iPhone game called "Astro Drone". People who possess a Parrot AR drone can play the game, in which they are challenged to perform different space missions in an augmented reality. The first release contains a training level, in which players will learn to dock as well as possible to the International Space Station.
However, the iPhone app is more than a game. Players can choose to participate in a scientific crowd-sourcing experiment that aims to improve autonomous capabilities of space probes, such as landing, obstacle avoidance, and docking. If participating, the app extracts visually salient features from the images made by the drone's camera. The features are then combined with the estimates of the drone's state (speed, height) and uploaded. The data is used in a research aiming to improve robot navigation.
The Astro Drone app can be downloaded for free at the Apple store. If you want to contribute to the research, please visit the high score table.
For more info: http://www.esa.int/
Download at the Apple store.
Support site: http://www.astrodrone.org/
Have fun!
Guido.
Comments
Lol, and I just completed converting my AR Drone to PX4FMU :P. Otherwise I would try this, might be fun for a few minutes.
iOS only. If only we could go back to the days of the portable operating system.
This is a really cool way to help assist in space exploration even though most of us aren't "rocket scientists" !