Hi guys,
I'm working on a project to create a wildlife protection network (which will become a NPO if technical/financial issues are not prohibitive) where drones play one of the most important roles, but I need the drones to be controlled via the internet (although there will always be a pilot on-site). This is to allow for students/people from all over the world to participate.
Is this feasable?
Thanks in advance for your feedback.
Replies
UgCS can be deployed in next configuration:
So on any laptop in the world you can get command&control functionality. Users will see telemetry, drones on the map and will have possibility to take control over drone.
About video.
UgCS can't translate video over internet. We have ideas, but not in nearest versions.
I think most reliable way (if you want to get good video quality and if you going to have large amount of spectators) is to use some ready equipment for video translation over internet from the field. On drones you can have usual video transceiver, video receiver on the ground, and next some magical device + video broadcasting provider can do rest... But! i'm not specialist in this area.
This article provides a lot of very useful information as well.
Communicating with Raspberry Pi via Mavlink
No point on relying on 3 or 4G in Africa.
900 is not permitted in RSA
The 5GHz signal works well enough.
In any case they will need internet connection from the drone or from ground computer in the field.
Our UgCS (www.ugcs.com) may be suitable for this scenario. It has component architecture - VSM - Vehicle specific modules, UCS - control server and client.
On computer in the field can be deployed VSM and client for field pilot. UCS can be deployed anywhere in the Internet. In Amazon Web Services for example. Clients connecting to UCS can be anywhere in the world.
Comparing Dronedeploy solution with UgCS we not tied to 4G and don't required specific equipment.
I'm curious as to why you have to use SIM-SIM traffic ? I have just started to experiment with video streaming on Raspberry Pi but have latency problems. Does SIM-SIM solve the latency problem? Have you seen this page (or is this you) ?
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/fpv-setup-with-raspberry-pi
What he means is that you have to have open ports. All incoming traffic is blocked in cellular networks by default. I don't know about the rest of the world, but here some service providers offer static IP (+ open ports) as an extra.
Another solution would be to use some sort of proxy server. I think that's what the Sky Drone FPV guys are doing.
The question with 3G and IP addresses is are they real IP addresses that are accessible on the Internet. Most providers for the large bulk of 3G connections will use non-routable addresses like 10.1 and 172.16 that are reserved for internal networks and will not be routed over the net. They then NAT these to a small number of real IP addresses that you don't see. So when you connect 3G to the net you get one of these addresses and you cannot from outside ping or connect to that address.
If you pay extra (usually) you can have a real IP address added to your 3G connection. That can be fixed like the Beagle SIM I have or dynamic but still a routable address. With Telstra here in Australia you used to be able to get a real address just by being added to a different APN however Telstra has closed that little loophole.
On the computer or router you fly in the plane you do a port forward to forward your camera port (eg:8081) from your internal IP address to the external address that you have. In this way on any PC on the net you can enter your IP address and port and the packets are forwarded to the camera as if it had the external IP address.
Most, if not all providers, can give you an routable address if you ask them and/or pay.
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