We have spent the past year developing a system to fly drones over the internet. We now have a hexacopter that can be flown from anywhere in the world using a joystick via APM Planner or Mission Planner (working on an iPad app as well). The latency is below 500 msecs and the video quality is 720p w/ 25fps. Obviously the flying requires the drone to be flown at a location with decent cellular coverage but we have been optimizing the platform to handle the inconsistencies inherent in cellular data connections by load balancing the data between multiple LTE radios. A single cellular modem is just not sufficient for true FPV flying. The F550 is piloted using APM planner and a joystick right now but will transition to the iPad app once we have finished testing it. All the video and controls are routed thru a central relay server so there is no concern about firewalls, VPNs or IP addresses. We have tested the system cross country flying from San Francisco with the drone over a field outside Boston. It has been a lot harder than we anticipated but the system is working very well right now and we are looking at ways to commercialize the technology.
Any ideas or feedback would be appreciated.
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Richard, the relay server is basically a proxy server with a public IP address. The hexacopter connects to the proxy server over the cellular network. The pilot app (APM planner) connects to the proxy server over a wired broadband connection all using TCP/UDP. Makes it al braindead to start a flight. Plug in the battery, the pixhawk and Pi boot up, connect to the Internet over the LTE modems and log onto the relay server. The pilot connects to the relay server using APM planner and starts flying.
Bojan, roughly 220MB during a 15 minute flight which is the US equates to about $0.45 per flight. Outside the US will obviously be more expensive
This is cool!
Can you tell us more about the connection?
" All the video and controls are routed thru a central relay server so there is no concern about firewalls, VPNs or IP addresses."
Agreed that would make it simpler but we have seen so many issues with the Pi crashing that it is kind of helpful to have the Pixhawk in the mix as well. Saved us many times
This was done a while back with the Raspberry Pi. I wonder how well it will work with a Raspberry pi autopilot like the navio+ to simplify things?
Which kind of interferences do you have?
Hi Bjoern, we are not setup to open source the system yet and still looking at commercial ideas, but we are definitely looking for people to collaborate with. We want to enable it on fixed wing aircraft as well. We started with a quadcopter because frankly they are easier to do quick tests of the video and flight controls with and then moved to a F550 for the bigger payload. The specs are:
Pixhawk
Arducopter 3.2.1
Raspberry Pi
Pi Camera module
Various LTE modems
Biggest issues are interference and the instability of the Pi USB subsystem
what are the specs of your solution?
Will it be open-source or commercial?
I have a Skywalker X8 Wing with a raspberry pi onboard and would love to make telemetry, potentially FPV and download of pics available over cellular network.
BR Bjoern
I think that would be great since many areas have poor or no cellular coverage. We started with cellular because 1) it is harder and 2) it is more flexible. No need to setup a ground station with antennas and backhaul, just put the drone on the ground and let it fly. But we expect to build out a wi-fi base approach as well.
What if we can combine it with wifi broadcast fpv:
diydrones.com/forum/topics/3-km-hd-fpv-system-using-commodity-hardw...
So in near distance it switches automatically to WiFi? Most of time we don't fly further than 2km.
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