With the latest advancements in small, cheap video transmitters, it’s no surprise First Person View remote-controlled aircraft are so popular. It’s the easiest way to get into a cockpit without having to spend thousands of dollars and fifty or so hours on a pilot’s license. Despite all the technical challenges of FPV flying, there’s still one underserved part of recording RC aircraft: third person view, or as it’s more commonly called, ‘handing a camcorder to your friend.’
[Walker Eric] would like to do something about that. He’s always wanted nice videos of him flying his plane, and he can’t film and fly at the same time. He can build a robot, though, and that’s his entry for The Hackaday Prize.
[Walker]’s project uses a base station with a camcorder mounted on a gimbal. The electronics for this setup are surprisingly simple – just a GPS beacon transmitting telemetry down to the base station. By comparing this data to a GPS receiver on the ground station, the direction of the plane can be computed.
There are a few problems with this setup. Altitude measurement with GPS isn’t very accurate, so [Walker] is using a pressure sensor as an altimeter on the GPS beacon. The current setup works great, and is a fantastic improvement over the OpenCV setup [Walker] tested out before moving to GPS.
[Walker] already has some incredible video of him flying some planes and quads around his local field shot with this system. You can check those out below.
I initially thought a third person view to the first person view in the plane. Like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgGsPaCVdjY . I wonder if an auto-tracking ground station cam fulfills the Line of Sight flight requirement which FPV (goggles at least) violates.
Wow, nice work. Finally an entry that demonstrates some real-world stuff instead of just an idea.
awesome. If he added some slew to the motors it would look smoother, but otherwise, great job. Wonder if he’s considered predictive movement of the camera based on current direction or remote control feedback?
Maybe a (relatively) simple pid setup in between the vector and motor control?
Also a bit of a hysteresis window so it will keep something in the middle frame rather than tracking too tightly.
so this? : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc7AZWaHm4o
Somewhat. But this one requires more movement. The one on your link only has one axis, while an airplane camera mount for this type of scenario requires all 3, to capture the video properly on the air.
Why not optical tracking ?
There’s a software system for telescopes and amateur astronomers >> http://www.optictracker.com/Home.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsA-e-u6A18
I wonder if a brushless gimbal has enough precision to film far away objects