Autonomously follow vehicles

I know that some commercial UAVs have a feature which allows the pilot to choose a vehicle and the UAV tracks/follows it.On the arudupilot mega, other than a camera, would I need additional hardware to program such a feature?

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  • My partner and I are trying to do the same thing. We were going to do it a different way(check out our form at object tracking). Our plan was to have a live video down link sent down to the ground station where the image processing would occur.
    The image processing would:
    figure out the targets GPS locating
    figure out a set of commands for the tilt and pan on the camera
    and give the targets speed.
    When it was done it would send a signal to the ArduMega over xbee comm. and give the UAV a a new way-point(which would be the targets location but with the UAV's current alt.) and give the appropriate commands to the camera on the pan and tilt.
    Its alot of delay because of the wireless transmission and off board calc. but if you think about it when you at <400 ft a moving car isnt going to moving out of your feild of veiw very fast so the tracking adjustjents wont need to be that sudddle anyway. It just seemed like an easy approach
  • Glad to help.
  • I would use a CMUcam3.
    See:
    http://www.cmucam.org/

    It's got an onboard processor that is capable of image recognition features (with camera resolution of 352x288 at 26 frames per second), and communicates via a serial port (which the ardupilot mega has 4 of). All software is open-source too.
    CMUcam: Open Source Programmable Embedded Color Vision Sensors
    Redmine
  • Moderator
    The easiest way to do this is buy all the gear from Procerus. Why re invent the wheel.
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