Tracking allows the drone to interact with its environment, and depending on the effect you want to create – and whether you’re working outdoors or indoors, where GPS is unreliable – there are several options available. The market leader when it comes to motion capture systems. The more expensive of the bunch. A full Bonita system suitable for UAV tracking could be had for under $20k. This brochure claims a full Bonita system could be had for as little as $10k, probably taking into account a smaller tracking volume than above. See a video of the Vicon T-Series being used outdoors in full sunlight. Using their online tool, a setup using 8 x of their Flex13 cameras (1280×1024 @ 120 fps) would come to £6774 to own and would cover an area of 7.3 x 7.3 x 2.5 metres and track 6 rigid bodies. Not sure if that rigid body limit is a software thing or a hardware thing. They have a Flex3 camera that is cheaper, but it’s 640×480 in resolution, so it would not be as accurate.

Used for the Lexus Amazing in motion – SWARM tracking Another Mocap system which could be interesting as their cameras come in a 3 x camera setup in a single unit, so it would be really easy to set up. Their claim is that a single one of these tripods (their smallest cheapest model) could do around 190 cubic metres of useful space. Multiple of these tripods can be combined for larger spaces. To summarise, a single tracker setup that can track 5 markers in a volume of about 6x6x4 metres for $30-35k. Easy-use system automatically calibrates multiple units; you can even move the sensors mid-capture and it’ll recover in a few seconds. Also their active marker system would not suffer from ID-swapping ever, where two trackers could otherwise swap IDs if they move close (Drone 1 becomes Drone 2 and vice versa). Traditional GPS has an accuracy of about 3 metres and doesn’t update very often – 5hz is considered pretty good. Flight controllers rely on a bunch of different sensors to give them the ability to fly;

generally they use inertial sensors that can give them an accurate idea of what just happened in the moment, how much the drone just rotated or how much it has seemed to move, but these values will drift over time as errors add up, so slower but absolute sensors (north is always north) like a compass and a GPS are used to correct the data from the inertial sensors.ar drone 2 4g Some OpenSource flight controllers have had support for RTK GPS for a while.ar drone 2 bilder A Kickstarter project originally, the Piksi RTK GPS was funded and is now shipping a development kit for $995. ar drone 2 4 ghzShips with 2 radio modules, one stays on the ground as a reference point and one flies. ar drone 2 for sale south africa

It can get centimeter precision with a 50hz update. 6. Augmented Reality (AR) Markers Having AR markers on the ground and tracking them with a camera on the drone is an option (or having the AR marker on the drone itself). These systems are based around patterns that are easy for the computer to find; storm drone 6 battery lifeonce it has found one of the patterns it can figure out the cameras relation to the marker. storm drone 4 manualThe algorithms are really fast and if you give up the choice of specifying your own patterns, a library like Studierstube Tracker can look for 4096 different markers in an image with low CPU usage. One big drawback is that the markers are pretty visible and could be considered ugly. The allure of this idea is that the tracked space could be pretty damn big at just the cost of more paper to print markers on.

It has the disadvantage that all the processing has to be made on the drone itself, so there is extra weight and power requirements. This puts some limit on the kind of camera that the drone could carry as well. ETH in 2010 used a PixHawk flight controller using an onboard vision system (camera + CPU) and markers on the ground to navigate: 7. On board depth cameras Conceptually similar to the idea of filling the space with easily (for the computer) recognisable AR markers, but using either a depth camera or color cameras with even more complicated algorithms to build up a 3D map of the environment for navigation. One disadvantage of this is that it’ll require a lot of processing to be done on the drone itself, so it’s not (in 2015) suitable for mini quads. The latest (at April 2015) and best example of this is this AscTec and intel collaboration that straps 6 Intel Realsense cameras onto an Asctec Firefly. It’s able to navigate through a forest at relatively high speeds.

8. Vision-based tracking systems Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping (SLAM). There have been a number of attempts to use SLAM with single color cameras to build up a 3D map of the environment. Using a single camera and moving it around, the drone can figure out 3D information by locking onto points and seeing how they move in relation to the camera. An example by AscTec. “The tum_ardrone Robot Operating System (ROS) package allows to let the Parrot AR.Drone fly autonomously, using PTAM-based, visual navigation As we’ve described in the section on INNOVATION, manual piloting is an effective way of piloting, and as of now likely to be among the cheaper of options. Next page in toolkit: MLF on aerial filming in 360°Back in 2010, our own John Biggs rightly described Parrot’s AR.Drone as ” the coolest thing [he had] seen in a long, long time.” Since then, Parrot has launched the AR.Drone 2.0 and while it’s still a very cool gadget, quadcopters have come a very long way since 2010.

Last month, the folks at DJI, who mostly specialize in developing unmanned aerial systems for commercial use, sent me one of their consumer-oriented and GPS-enabled DJI Phantoms to review. Most quadcopters are aimed at hobbyists and take a good amount of assembly and at least some experience with flying remote-controlled aircraft. The Phantom, which has a list price of $849 but currently retails for about $680, comes mostly pre-assembled and is extremely easy to fly, thanks to its built-in compass and GPS module. Thanks to having GPS built-in, the drone always knows where it is in relation to you. So depending on the mode you are flying in, every input you give will always be interpreted in relation to you and not in relation to where the front of the aircraft is (here’s a video that explains how this works). The other cool thing about the GPS mode is that the drone can hover in position even if it’s windy. It’ll just auto-correct for the wind, thanks to its built-in autopilot (you probably want to turn this mode off when you are trying to take a video, however, as the constant corrections will show up in your videos).

This autopilot also kicks in if the Phantom loses its connection with your remote control if it flies out of reach or your remote runs out of battery, the drone itself is very low on battery, or because you turn it off to see if the autopilot actually works. Once the failsafe mode kicks in, the drone will simply fly up to 60 feet, fly back to where it first took off and land. I actually tried this and it worked surprisingly well. The drone touched down just about 3 feet from where I launched it. When you spent $700 on the drone and another $300 or so on a GoPro 3 Silver, that’s a nice feature to have. The Phantom is a clear step up from something like the AR.Its communication distance is just under 1,000 feet and a maximum horizontal speed of about 32 feet per second and a descent speed of close to 20 feet per second. That’s fast and feels even faster if you are just learning how to fly it. These specs show that this isn’t just a toy but can actually be used for some pretty impressive aerial photography.

Indeed, since the Phantom launched earlier this year, a whole ecosystem has sprung up around it that provides owners with everything from improved propellers to cases and multi-axis camera gimbals. A gimbal, by the way, isn’t a must, but if you want to take really stable videos without the so-called “jello” effect (here’s a pretty extreme example of that), both a gimbal and some well-balanced after-market rotors will surely help. Here is a video I took with the Phantom and a GoPro 3 White over the weekend: The Phantom’s battery lasts just under 15 minutes, so you probably want to buy at least a second one, given that the package only includes a single 2,200mAh battery and a charger. If you decide to get one of these, by the way, make sure you read the instructions and watch this series of videos before you turn it on. The Phantom may look like a toy and is easy to fly, but this is a pretty high-end piece of technology and there are a few things you need to know and do before your first flight.