Beyond GPS: Navigating India’s Urban Canyons with ORB-SLAM3 and ROS2
Beyond GPS: Navigating India’s Urban Canyons with ORB-SLAM3 and ROS2 The dream of a drone-delivery-filled sky in India faces one massive, concrete obstacle: the Urban Canyon . In high-density hubs like Mumbai’s Lower Parel or Bangalore’s Indiranagar, traditional GPS is notoriously unreliable. Between signal multi-path errors (where signals bounce off glass skyscrapers) and heavy electromagnetic interference, a drone relying solely on GNSS is a crash waiting to happen. If India is to become a global drone hub by 2030, we have to move beyond GPS . The solution? Visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). The Tech Stack: Why ORB-SLAM3 + ROS2 Humble? For autonomous UAVs, weight and power consumption are the enemies. While LiDAR is precise, it’s heavy and power-hungry. Visual SLAM offers a "biological" approach—using cameras to "see" and "remember" the environment. ORB-SLAM3: Currently the most versatile library for Visual SLAM. It supports Monocula...