Our outdoor aerial motion capture system's fleet includes 5 Octocopters and 2 Helium-based blimps. The Octocopters are 8-rotor VTOL vehicles which are based on the Microkopter's modular payload carrier. For open hardware flight control we use the Openpilot Revolution, interfaced with a 2.4GHz Graupner RC remote transmitter. An Intel i7 based micro-ATX server board and an NVidia Jetson TX1 are used for on board computer vision, aerial navigation and data storage on SSD. Sensors include a USB3 2 MP 60 fps global shutter camera, IMU, 3 axis compass, barometer, GPS receiver and a differential GPS receiver for reference position ground truth. They communicate using a 5GHz USB3 Wifi adapter.

The blimps utilize buoyant lifting envelopes between 3 and 10 meters in length. They are actuated with control surfaces on each of their 4 tail-fins in a traditional + layout, as well as a lateral yaw thruster in the bottom tail fin. Main propulsion are two independently controllable thrusters - tiltable in pitch on a joint thrust vector axis through the gondola. For open hardware flight control we use the Openpilot Revolution, interfaced with a 2.4GHz Graupner RC remote transmitter. An NVidia Jetson TX2 is used for on board computer vision, aerial navigation and data storage on SSD. Sensors include IMU, 3 axis compass, barometer, GPS receiver and a differential pressure sensor for airspeed connected to a pitot tube. Communication utilizes 5GHz USB3 Wifi integrated into the main computer.

The data acquired includes RGB Images at 40 fps and 6D poses of the Octocopters at 100 Hz. Additionally, we also record ground truth (GT) pose data of the tracked person using a body-mounted IMU suit and Diff-GPS tags. GT of Octocopters are recorded using Diff-GPS tags.