Comment by montag
11 years ago
Awesome project. Have you thought about using a spherical camera, so that the pan/tilt can be done entirely in software? Make it a bandwidth problem, instead of a mechanical problem.
11 years ago
Awesome project. Have you thought about using a spherical camera, so that the pan/tilt can be done entirely in software? Make it a bandwidth problem, instead of a mechanical problem.
I think one major issue there is that all of the available video transmitters for FPV transmit in standard definition. You'd have a hard time spreading that over a sphere and being able to coble anything useful together.
Most of the FPV videos you see on youtube are not showing what the pilot saw in real time. They're showing you the HD that was recording on board the plane and retrieved after landing.
You don't really have to send the entire video feed from the camera, only the part your looking at. That way, most of the "software" is running remotely, and you also don't have a mechanical component to worry about.
Or, for a more challenging (though more dangerous and probably less useful) project, make the head tracking control the pitch, roll, and yaw of the quadcopter directly. With altitude hold functionality (a lot of flight controllers implement this with a barometer, though not the DJI Phantom) you could have completely hands free flight.
I had thought of this, then I wondered, why not have head movement do both? That is, have the camera pan/tilt/roll in sync with your head and also shift the plane on the same axis. That way you could know which way was centered (looking out over the nose of the craft), and immediately see where you'd be headed when the turn completed.
There's a chap who got a Parrot AR Drone flying like this - they're quite simple to control with arbitrary devices via node.js and nodecopter. Fun proof of concept.
Think about the geometry of that problem harder - particularly when it comes to the stereo vision aspect.