I haven't seen much success with this so I will throw this out there again and see if it goes anywhere. I am building a UAV to fly a search grid and autonomously detect people using various image recognition algorithms. I need to be able to extract GPS data from the UAV live whenever an person is detected and integrate the data into the output generated by the algorithms in Matlab. I am wanting to do this on the ground so it would have to take place by either cloning the com port that I use for my telemetry or reading the r/tlog files being written by the mission planner software real-time
I have opted for reading from the tlog file but I can't seem to figure out the format. Has anyone had any luck with this or could anyone shed some light on a different way to approach this problem? Thanks.
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Have a look at http://qgroundcontrol.org/mavlink/mavproxy_startpage
Hi Adam,
I am thinking of doing something similar although not for tracking people. I am really only interested in the position data, rather than everything else in the .tlog. With that in mind, I have started to hack around with the mission planner so that it supports incoming socket connections.
The idea would be to allow other software to connect and register as a MAVLink listener with the mission planner so that as MAVLink data comes in, it could be forwarded on for other software to do with as it wished. The other software would only get the types of MAVLink packets it registered for. I haven't done any socket programming for a few years and there may be better ways to make this work, so I'll continue to play.
I'll let you know how this goes, but I would think it would be cleaner than trying to read tlogs. If it works out, I'll ask Michael Osbourne to include the code in future mission planners.
Cheers
James