Drone positioning with camera and MyRio

[MarcusNilsen]

Hello.

We are trying to make an autonomous drone, that must fly and orient itself by looking for some visual markers. We are thinking that these markers should be QR codes so that the drone can differentiate between what marker it is looking at.

The assignment dictates that we must use at least one MyRio-1900. This myRio we use on the drone, and then control the drone from a ground computer that sends a signal over wifi of where the drone must fly to.

We were thinking of 2 ways to get these images.  The first option is with a USB webcam placed on the drone directly plugged into the MyRio. Then the MyRio will read the QR code and send a signal back to the PC, so the computer can say where the drone must fly next.

The problem with this option is that we are not sure that the MyRio can handle the videofeed/analyzing fast enough to be really useful.

The other option is to use a wifi-camera (or maybe some other camera), and send the videofeed directly to the computer which will then analyze the feed and give directions to the MyRio/drone.

The problem with this is that it seems like a rather big problem to get a GoPro videofeed into labview on the computer, and then once we get this videofeed, we have no way to send it to the myRio since we need to be connected to the GoPros wifi to get the feed from it.

So all in all I am asking if anybody have some good suggestions for how we best can overcome this problem. I am thinking that the best way would be if we could somehow connect to ground computer to the GoPro, get the feed in and still be connected to the MyRio on the drone. Maybe we could connect the GoPro and the MyRio to a router and then send that signal to the ground computer.

I hope you have some good ideas because we could really use some.

Best regards

[cbutcher]

If you're comfortable with FPGA programming for the myRIO (which seems like a typical requirement for myRIO assignments, I would think/hope), then you'll have no problem doing the necessary processing on the myRIO. It will undoubtedly be faster than transferring video feed back to a host PC and then processing there, and returning the response.

Determine what process you want to follow. For example:

1. Read image using USB camera into myRIO
2. Determine if a QR code is visible
3. Read the QR code
4. Transmit the current code to the host, receive an instruction for direction in response
5. Move in direction
6. Look for QR code
7. Repeat?

I have no idea if that set of steps would work, but hopefully it illustrates the idea - come up with a plan.

Once you have that, work on each step. Image processing can probably be carried out quickly on the myRIO. Storing a map may or may not be desireable. This sounds like a fairly complicated project...

[MarcusNilsen]

Thanks for the reply!

I will look into some FPGA programming then.

Yeah it is a fairly big project, so we will see how much we can produce.