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!
I had a chance last week to fly a couple of patterns and go something usable on the 3rd try. A simple path that only took pictures going into the wind to make the spacing consistent. I used Atto V1.8 with a Canon A590 8meg camera I got off craigslist for $50. I'm amazed how well it stitch together all by itself in Microsoft ICE. The wind was out of the south so it was crabbing a lot to the right. Not sure if thats the reason for the slight curver to the picture.
Taking the pictures was easier than figuring out how to display 120 8meg pictures. I tried PTGui without much luck but ICE stitched it up and I uploaded a Deep Zoom group to my web site.
Hi everybody,
brakar was flying in interesting GPS conditions, hence the seriously-ill navigation periods. The whole situation is being analyzed, he has flown around 40min BEFORE the predicted official LOW-SAT window.
As EasyUAV was naturally losing additional satellites from view during turns, the GPS was lost completely for less than 1s several times in that flight. The plane was flying then on pure inertials (enabling in deep turn thus involving large course error before it levelled), but the dropout was too brief to cause automatic mission abort and this is why we can see those photos at all.
This is my preliminary entry using EasyUAV:
the battery died too fast and the plane automatically returned home (miscalculated battery state, making too many flight pattern tests earlier, without the camera).
Used Microsoft ICE without effort as the photos were almost perfectly aligned. CropScan.kmz
This post is scanning only half of the surface and there is no Santa Claus around, so formally insufficient but IMO worth sharing. Made Dec 27th last year, just after the snow has melted.
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
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
We may in reality be using the single core version, but I'm pretty sure it's dual core. At the time we purchased it, it was the only Atom product available. We could have gone smaller form factor (Nano-ITX etc.), which we used to fly, but they were VIA boards and linux drivers were crap, they were slow pc's (still fast enough for simply taking pictures, embedding telemetry, and streaming the photos back to us) , unreliable at best and they were fairly expensive. We've killed one Atom Mini ITX board in the 1.5 years we've been flying this pc, and that was likely because someone drilled a hole in the board. Now, I would buy a Zotac board instead, Nvidia onboard chipsets are far superior to the intel ones, and the unit is fanless, i.e, more reliable.
Also, they have recently introduced nano-ITX atom boards, which look awesome but they are more expensive ($400 vs. $100) and the hardware is less available, and may or may not be as reliable. I will recommend Intel over VIA (or even AMD for that matter), their stuff just seems to work better.
Comments
www.kiss-sys.com You'll need to have Silverlight 2 installed
to see the Deep Zoom
I had a chance last week to fly a couple of patterns and go something usable on the 3rd try. A simple path that only took pictures going into the wind to make the spacing consistent. I used Atto V1.8 with a Canon A590 8meg camera I got off craigslist for $50. I'm amazed how well it stitch together all by itself in Microsoft ICE. The wind was out of the south so it was crabbing a lot to the right. Not sure if thats the reason for the slight curver to the picture.Taking the pictures was easier than figuring out how to display 120 8meg pictures. I tried PTGui without much luck but ICE stitched it up and I uploaded a Deep Zoom group to my web site.
PhotoMission3.kmlIt was fun to do, I could do swimming pool inspections for the city and get rich.
Kisssys
brakar was flying in interesting GPS conditions, hence the seriously-ill navigation periods. The whole situation is being analyzed, he has flown around 40min BEFORE the predicted official LOW-SAT window.
As EasyUAV was naturally losing additional satellites from view during turns, the GPS was lost completely for less than 1s several times in that flight. The plane was flying then on pure inertials (enabling in deep turn thus involving large course error before it levelled), but the dropout was too brief to cause automatic mission abort and this is why we can see those photos at all.
See
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?p=14059833&postcount=2
the battery died too fast and the plane automatically returned home (miscalculated battery state, making too many flight pattern tests earlier, without the camera).
Used Microsoft ICE without effort as the photos were almost perfectly aligned.
CropScan.kmz
This post is scanning only half of the surface and there is no Santa Claus around, so formally insufficient but IMO worth sharing. Made Dec 27th last year, just after the snow has melted.
Reduced quality is always costly ;-)
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
Looks great! Is that EasyUAV again?
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.
To my knowledge, we are using this board:
http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D945GCLF2D-Mini-ITX-Motherboard
We may in reality be using the single core version, but I'm pretty sure it's dual core. At the time we purchased it, it was the only Atom product available. We could have gone smaller form factor (Nano-ITX etc.), which we used to fly, but they were VIA boards and linux drivers were crap, they were slow pc's (still fast enough for simply taking pictures, embedding telemetry, and streaming the photos back to us) , unreliable at best and they were fairly expensive. We've killed one Atom Mini ITX board in the 1.5 years we've been flying this pc, and that was likely because someone drilled a hole in the board. Now, I would buy a Zotac board instead, Nvidia onboard chipsets are far superior to the intel ones, and the unit is fanless, i.e, more reliable.
Also, they have recently introduced nano-ITX atom boards, which look awesome but they are more expensive ($400 vs. $100) and the hardware is less available, and may or may not be as reliable. I will recommend Intel over VIA (or even AMD for that matter), their stuff just seems to work better.
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