What is Dragonfly

Dragonfly is a computer vision based technology and allows to simultaneously localize robots, AGVs, drones, forklifts (and any other asset that can be equipped with just a monocular or stereoscopic camera) while improving the localization accuracy through a continuous mapping of the surrounding environment. Dragonfly estimates in real-time the 3D position of the camera at 20Hz+ and provides its latitude, longitude, altitude and orientation (6 Degrees of Freedom).

Dragonfly represents the state-of-the-art in indoor localization technologies (where systems such GPS cannot be used). Compared to Dragonfly, other indoor localization technologies are:

• less competitive in terms of installation and maintenance costs (laser systems, UWB).
• less competitive in terms of localization accuracy (systems based on the measurement of the attenuation of Wi-Fi/Bluetooth radio signals).

How Dragonfly works

While Dragonfly is running:

• a camera captures real-time images of the environment and sends them to a computing unit.
• the geo-localization algorithm inside the computing unit takes care of:
  1. extrapolate the peculiarities of the environment detected in each individual frame.
  2. compare the real-time detected peculiarities with the peculiarities saved inside a 3D map of the environment (created previously in the mapping phase).
  3. compute the position of the camera in the form of WGS84 coordinates (latitude and longitude) and distances in meters (X, Y) with respect to an origin and make them available in real-time through:
     • the Dragonfly Web User Interface (accessible using any browser).
     • a REST API call.
     • a CSV file.