Welcome to the Time Trust Trial contest, Round 4 (T3-4)! This round is an aerial imaging task. Here is your assignment:
Program your UAV to take photos from an altitude of ~400 feet that you then stitch together to make a single image showing an area of 500mx500m (a quarter square kilometer). Somewhere in that image, a Santa (or replica of a Santa, poster of a Santa, just you wearing a Santa hat, etc) must be seen. NO PHOTOSHOP (ie, the sample above would be disqualified)--you actually need to bring something Santa-ish to the field so your UAV can capture it in its shots (yes, I know it will be very small. Just circle the location in your image so we can enlarge and inspect--don't make us do "Where's Wally"!) This is to prove that the shots aren't actually taken from Google Earth ;-)
You can use any path strategy you want: "lawnmower", spiral, concentric circles, etc...
For stitching software, I use the free PTGui, but you're welcome to use whatever software you prefer.
And for your camera, may I suggest you hack up some cool way to trigger the shutter with our cool ServoSwitch?
KML tracks must be provided. Video is not required, but is suggested.
We've now switched to a six-week cycle, so the deadline is 12:00 midnight PST on Sunday, January 17, 2010 now Monday, January 18th due to the Martin Luther King holiday in the US.
The overall winner will be the best quality image, as decided by the judges (based on a combination of resolution, stitch quality and overall coolness--a clever Santa will win you brownie points, and a pretty area is no bad thing [note: snow is lovely, but be warned that it can confuse stitching software]), but everyone who completes the challenge will win a prize.
Enjoy!
Nice competition and a good try brakar!
Hope it gets a little milder here soon so I can get back in the air again...
I will have a new UAV for the 2010 season...
/Bjorn
Yes it was EasyUAV, as last time:
- Plane: EasyUAV/ FlexiPilot
- Camera: Canon Ixus 980 IS, (with CHDK installed, running script for remote trigging)
- Trigger: 5V current from Flexipilot to camera
- Picktures, In total 155, one shot each 40m, 14.7Mpix, (in tocal about 787MB)
- Radio: Futaba 7C
- GS, wireless link etc: not present
I made a second attempt for the T3-4 round today and think I had great success with my newly developed flight pattern for photo shooting. Even had installed UV-filter on the camera in order to remove UV reflection from the snow, and finally got the FlyCamOne II to recording for the first time.
The run was carried out in -15 deg celcius and about 4 m/s wind. At this site the terrain is quite flat, so I had high hopes for some easy stitching using PTGui.
So for the results; it turned out I must have touched the cameras zoom button while installing it in the plane. Hence, only dark picktures with little or no overlap for stitching, so no stitch to show.
Due to poor weatherforecast and traveling activities the forthcomming days, I am afraight this was my last attempt for this round. However, the round have been of great learning value for me, and I have lots of picktures which I plan to use to explore GIS software. First Out will be EnsoMosaic.
I might post a video from todays flight later, after some editing, (turned out to be upside-down).
Thanks for the hints about image processing software. OSSIM I did actually download some months ago, but have not been able to produce anything meaningful with it yet. I found some basic tutorials, but beside that I found little haterials about how to use.
Thank you both for the info. I was looking at the UBNT RS board some time ago and deemed it to be too large and heavy. Now (after realizing that inches aren't really that huge :) they're just heavy (at 210 g). But otherwise the RS looks pretty good, I'm not throwing it out just yet. I've been directed to some Mikrotik and Wili routerboards that are in the 50 g range - I'll be flying as soon as I manage to push unbranded linux on those. We'll see.
If you just need a small board to mount the XR5 so you can transmit telemetry and do some light processing you may be able to use either an Ubiquiti RouterStation or RouterStation Pro. These board are about 4" square and cost about $80. The RS Pro has more ports, but requires a 48 volt power supply. The boards have 3 minipci slots, so there is room for additional storage etc.
There are many other options depending on what your specifications are. Another product that you may also be interested in is the Bullet 5M HP. It has the same transmit power as the XR5 and simply gives you an ethernet port to interface to. This eliminates having to deal with driver and networking issues.
The biggest problem is the XR5 can draw 1 watt. The PCI specified maximum is 600mW; therefore, your card is cable of drawing nearly double the power a standard PCI slot can provide! These small form factor boards are even more restrictive. For this reason, we are looking at the following: http://www.ubnt.com/products/rs.php
The difficulty with the ubiquti products are their lack of x86 support, thus running into software issues. However, full Linux SDK's exist, and if you're willing to spend the time you can probably make it work, and at that point, the embedded systems will be more reliable than off the shelf pc hardware.
Thanks for the software links BTW, I'll be playing with those and testing their capabilities against our needs.
ALIX3D3 (ALIX.3D3) Board with 1 LAN and 2 miniPCI, LX800
Comments
Hope it gets a little milder here soon so I can get back in the air again...
I will have a new UAV for the 2010 season...
/Bjorn
http://www.vimeo.com/8657412
Strange thing; the whole video was about 30minutes and 660MB. When I exported a short 1min clip in reduced quality it ended up at 275MB !
Yes it was EasyUAV, as last time:
- Plane: EasyUAV/ FlexiPilot
- Camera: Canon Ixus 980 IS, (with CHDK installed, running script for remote trigging)
- Trigger: 5V current from Flexipilot to camera
- Picktures, In total 155, one shot each 40m, 14.7Mpix, (in tocal about 787MB)
- Radio: Futaba 7C
- GS, wireless link etc: not present
Looks great! Is that EasyUAV again?
KML: trace.txt.trace001.kml
The run was carried out in -15 deg celcius and about 4 m/s wind. At this site the terrain is quite flat, so I had high hopes for some easy stitching using PTGui.
So for the results; it turned out I must have touched the cameras zoom button while installing it in the plane. Hence, only dark picktures with little or no overlap for stitching, so no stitch to show.
Due to poor weatherforecast and traveling activities the forthcomming days, I am afraight this was my last attempt for this round. However, the round have been of great learning value for me, and I have lots of picktures which I plan to use to explore GIS software. First Out will be EnsoMosaic.
I might post a video from todays flight later, after some editing, (turned out to be upside-down).
brakar
Yeah, they all are a little cryptic to say the least. Steep learning curve :)
Here's another free package that looks the most user friendly of those three: http://www.qgis.org/
Thanks for the hints about image processing software. OSSIM I did actually download some months ago, but have not been able to produce anything meaningful with it yet. I found some basic tutorials, but beside that I found little haterials about how to use.
Back on topic - 17 days left!
If you just need a small board to mount the XR5 so you can transmit telemetry and do some light processing you may be able to use either an Ubiquiti RouterStation or RouterStation Pro. These board are about 4" square and cost about $80. The RS Pro has more ports, but requires a 48 volt power supply. The boards have 3 minipci slots, so there is room for additional storage etc.
There are many other options depending on what your specifications are. Another product that you may also be interested in is the Bullet 5M HP. It has the same transmit power as the XR5 and simply gives you an ethernet port to interface to. This eliminates having to deal with driver and networking issues.
The biggest problem is the XR5 can draw 1 watt. The PCI specified maximum is 600mW; therefore, your card is cable of drawing nearly double the power a standard PCI slot can provide! These small form factor boards are even more restrictive. For this reason, we are looking at the following: http://www.ubnt.com/products/rs.php
The difficulty with the ubiquti products are their lack of x86 support, thus running into software issues. However, full Linux SDK's exist, and if you're willing to spend the time you can probably make it work, and at that point, the embedded systems will be more reliable than off the shelf pc hardware.
Thanks for the software links BTW, I'll be playing with those and testing their capabilities against our needs.
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