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Vertical video with associated telemetry

Posted by Paulo Neves on February 7, 2014 at 10:23am

Hello,

I am making a thesis about a system to auto land a quadcopter on a station based on a visual homing system.
I have already made some studies on the problem, and used Youtube footage to test some hypothesis. The problem is that visual homing is too computationaly expensive to be done in the air without some conditioning of the images with telemetry information.

The Youtube videos I have found are below. The problem I found with the Youtube data is that I think measuring the parameters by hand would a bit tedious. I also thought of using satelite data which has scale and orientation data but I am not sure if I could get the accuracy I needed near the ground.

Vertical FPV Highland and Yucaipa CA

Gopro looking straight down on the skywalker fpv

As an example of my approach:

* In a certain position I take a vertical picture of the terrain below.

* Correct the scale of the feature points I am looking for with altitude data.

* Correct the orientation of the image with the orientation data.

* Detect and match the feature points

* Take a course of action based on the matched points, like point correlation

Without this corrections the algorithms necessary would be unwieldy in the air.

So what I am asking is:Does any body know, or have footage of a flight with the camera looking down and the associated timestamped telemetry?

How could I simulate something like this without acquiring all the equipment beforehand.  If somebody is available to do this as a job I am open to offers.

Thank you a lot and I am open to suggestions.

Paulo Neves

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Replies

  • Andre K. February 7, 2014 at 12:46pm
    Modify firmware for the flow meter, so it homes in on a blinking led. I hadn't even had time to start on it. Maybe you do.
    • Paulo Neves > Andre K. February 9, 2014 at 1:56am
      Do you mean the openCV example?

      I think I can get the recognition going but i would really like a log of a flight with the photos or video to validate the recognition.

      Thanks for the reply.
      • Andre K. > Paulo Neves February 9, 2014 at 4:38am

        you can take as many photos/video you like, but that's another story, the flowmeter or is still the way to do the job.   px4flow could store images too.

        • Paulo Neves > Andre K. February 9, 2014 at 5:17am
          Ahhh wow. I had no knowledge of this. Thank you a lot. I will investigate the px4flow further because it would simplify the navigation considerably. From your experience what is the position accuracy that is achievable at very low altitudes?

          Thank you a good lot!
          • Andre K. > Paulo Neves February 9, 2014 at 11:26am

            It should not be a problem to land with precision of <+/-5cm.  the resolution is better than needed, but the final landing will be affected by ground effect /downwash turbulence, which will make it harder to compensate for movement in the final moment.

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