AprilTag is a visual fiducial system, useful for a wide variety of tasks including augmented reality, robotics, and camera calibration. It consists of a small C library with minimal dependencies.
Targets can be created from an ordinary printer, and the AprilTag detection software computes the precise 3D position, orientation, and identity of the tags relative to the camera. The AprilTag library is implemented in C with no external dependencies. It is designed to be easily included in other applications, as well as be portable to embedded devices. Real-time performance can be achieved even on cell-phone grade processors.
AprilTags are conceptually similar to QR Codes, in that they are a type of two-dimensional bar code. However, they are designed to encode far smaller data payloads (between 4 and 12 bits), allowing them to be detected more robustly and from longer ranges. Further, they are designed for high localization accuracy— you can compute the precise 3D position of the AprilTag with respect to the camera.
This is free and open source software.
Website: april.eecs.umich.edu/software/apriltag
Support: GitHub code repository
Developer: APRIL Robotics Lab under thedirection of Edwin Olson
License: BSD 2-Clause License
AprilTag is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Robotics Software | |
|---|---|
| NASA Vision Workbench | Image processing in the context of machine vision |
| DART | Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit |
| Gazebo Sim | Robot simulation made easy |
| AprilTag | Visual fiducial system popular for robotics research |
| Webots | Multi-platform desktop application used to simulate robots |
| ROS | Software framework for building robot applications |
| ARGoS | Physics-based simulator designed to simulate robot swarms |
| MoveIt | Robotic manipulation platform for ROS 2 |
| OpenRTM-aist | Component-oriented development of robot systems |
| The Player Project | Cross-platform robot device interface & server |
| Urbi | Universal Robot Body Interface |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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