Visual Servoing using Drone Gimbal API



While choosing the right camera and streaming the video from a drone to your app has always been a frequently asked question. There we’ve several Drone API and SDK to build awesome apps for your drones.

What comes along is the selection of a suitable drone Gimbal to stabilize and maneuver that camera. And, what becomes more challenging is when you wish to gain control of gimbal’s Roll, Pitch, and Yawmovements through your code or app.

Whether you are trying to automate the drone gimbal to take that perfect Cable Cam Shot or implement something such as Visual Servoing, Optic flow or any other Machine Vision application, controlling and integrating Gimbal Movements is necessary for your algorithm and hence your app.

FlytBase Drone Gimbal API lets you take control of Roll, Pitch and Yaw movements of your Gimbal through simple API calls. You can send commands from your Companion computer to the Gimbal connected to an autopilot.

Drone APIs are available in JS REST, JS Websocket, ROSC++, ROSPy, C++ and Python to build onboard as well as Mobile/Web application.

You can download FlytSIM – Drone App Simulator to test drone APIs and your Apps.

Visual Servoing Demo and Tutorial

In the Demo below we have demonstrated how a complicated drone application can be built easy & quick by using available FlytBase Drone APIs and Mobile/Web SDK.

 

We implemented a Visual Servoing application using drone gimbal. Visual servoing, also known as vision-based robot-actuator control, is a technique which uses feedback information extracted from a vision sensor (in this case Camera) to control the motion of a robot/actuator (in this case Gimbal). Below is the image showing the architecture of the Visual Servoing application.

gimbal-arch.png?width=550

Using this application you can select and lock onto the desired object and Gimbal will keep tracking that object (as long as it’s under the scope of the Gimbal)

The application uses following APIs and SDK

– Vision API to detect and track object

– Gimbal API to control attitude setpoint of gimbal (Roll, Pitch, Yaw)

– Web SDK to build a web-based application interface.

– Video Streaming API to stream the video to the app to see and select the object in the video.

( You can use Navigation APIs to give setpoints and control drone navigation from your app.)

You can find the Source Code for the app on Github in FlytBase Drone Sample Apps Repo.

Follow the Readme to learn: how to do visual servoing on your drone.

For any queries please reach out to us on Forums and Join FlytOS Developers group to engage in the interesting discussions with fellow developers. Also, you can follow us on Twitter.


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Comments

  • Excellent work !

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