Seems to me that a video camera could be used to determine a lot of things. For example, send out two parallel laser beams and measure the distance between them to get a distance to the object/ground. Or roll/pitch/yaw info. Would also be nice to have HD photos sent back, even if only one every 20 seconds.A USB web cam plugged into a RouterStation board running Open-WRT might be the right amount of CPU power.
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Absolutely. With two cameras you will be able to have stereo vision and retrieve depth information. If you know your exact specs of the camera you can compute the distances and relation to other points just off of two images. It’s a hard problem. I am trying to actually at some point when I find time is to build a small stereo camera rig. So have two USB cameras attached to a micro computer such as a Gumstix, and using OpenCV process the images and then use it for planning algorithms. Some other practical uses for computer vision applications on UAV’s is if you don’t know the terrain, and you want to explore the road, you can do a road follow application. Since you can have a GPS on the UAV, a very interesting application is to map the road you follow. Or go find a landmark, maybe chase a car.
There is tons of information you can get from this, and you can do it for cheap. No need to chip out thousands of dollars for laser range scanners if you don’t have the money. But it is tough. Right now I am taking a robotics class and my project I chose is to create a map of where I have been using stereo vision. So I will use two cameras as a odometer and direction I am going.
Not sure if anyone else here is working on Computer vision applications on UAV’s. I would be very interested in helping out or getting involved.
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There is tons of information you can get from this, and you can do it for cheap. No need to chip out thousands of dollars for laser range scanners if you don’t have the money. But it is tough. Right now I am taking a robotics class and my project I chose is to create a map of where I have been using stereo vision. So I will use two cameras as a odometer and direction I am going.
Not sure if anyone else here is working on Computer vision applications on UAV’s. I would be very interested in helping out or getting involved.