Benjamin Yeomans

Hi everyone, For my dissertation next year I have come up with a project that is to make a UAV with an attatched undercarriage camera which will take photos of a field to determine the health of the crop. However I have no idea what sort of camera I am looking for to get high quality photos without any motion blur from the aircraft moving along. Also the plane will be limited to a height of 200ft so I need something that'll be able to take pictures of high quality from that altitude and in quick succision of the each photo being taken like one second in between each photo if possible, as I will then be stitching all the photos together to give an overview of the field. Many thanks in advance And I look forward to hearing from you guys Ben

Hey everyone, Sorry bit of an update , after speaking to the uni they wanted something more academic rather than something that just showed details of a flight and I met a supervisor who has an idea for a UAV project which is - 2. Mosaicing aerial imagery captured from a low-level UAV. Using a multi-rotor radio control helicopter we have acquired multiple datasets of images of fields of crops. From this data, we can calculate a number of measures which can indicate how healthy the crops are in the field. However, the multiple individual images need stitching together to form one large image representing the field (see left). Current automatic methods do not work well on such sets of images, as the content of the images is so similar. In this project, the challenge is to build a tool which will allow the user to load in such a set of images, try to automatically stitch the images together based on their content, and allow the users to refine the final results manually if necesary. Obviosly instead of a helicopter I'll be using my RC plane with the pi and I am still going to implement my orginal idea with this one , what I need is decent cameras that will take High quality photos at a low level without any blur if any of you have any advice on what to get that would be greatly appreciated Ben

  Sorry about the late response guys, Certainty an interesting idea that search and rescue idea may have to do something around that. I like the idea of auto IDing certain objects I don't know how hard it would be to implement though. Si , Thanks for your advice it's always good to hear from a lecturer and get their take on it. Unfortunately my Uni doesn't want to hear anything about ideas until the autumn term so this has definitely helped. Done a bit of C & C++ but you're right it has been mostly Java they've been teaching us but I much prefer C++ to Java but don't mind using both really. I was going to have a play around with it this summer and see if any problems do arise. Obviously I have to learn to fly my model first, do any of you know the best way to go about this , Join a club or go about it myself. If a club do you know any decent clubs around the Suffolk area(Bury St Edmunds/ Ipswich area )   Ben   Edited By Benjamin Yeomans on 02/05/2013 18:28:27

The police shouldn't have to worry about this I would have thought, but I'll check with the Uni thanks . I have thought about the pi being powered by a separate battery pack I have found a few good tutorials on hacking the micro sd and hijacking it up to a battery pack to make the pi portable. Thanks I am glad the project is getting lots of positive attitude towards it that's always means I've got come up with something good and something that interests me! a super60 type model? I had a quick google seems to be an RC plane, sorry I am very new to the RC plane world could you explain? Ben

Thanks for all the responses , Stevo, I did look into FPV ,a video on youtube of a FPV first gave me this idea however am I right in thinking it is quite expensive? also I think the real time readouts is possible that was my original idea having a real time readout of speed, flight footage etc. however this could prove quite challenging I would have thought? but defiantly a possibility! Thanks for you're reply Ian , yes unfortunately after I posted this I found a few other software’s that did exactly what my idea was

Hi all, I am currently in my 2nd year at uni doing a computer science degree. I have to start thinking about my dissertation for my 3rd year project, now I am new to flying RC planes and would like some adivce as to say if this idea would work with the plane I have (skywalker axion). Idea My idea is to get a rasberry pi (basically a mini computer about the size of a credit card) and add a few modules to it, these would include a GPS module and some others for a few other features I am yet to come up with. basically I would have this GPS module which tracks the speed, alltitude and location and flight path of an RC plane I would then create some software which would display all this information/data gathered from the flight in a program e.g. graphs for altitude and speed, I could use a google map api for the GPS side which would allow me to display the flight path in 3d using google maps. I was also thinking of adding a small camera to the nose of the plane so the user can record their flight or maybe stream it to the program so it could be used in real time. my main question is, would this work? would my skywalker axion flight be affected in any way with the new added weight(rasberry pi is only a few grams!!) I would store the rasberry pi into the little compartment where the ailerons, engine and stuff are linked up or could there be a better place to attach it. also I'd like to know if this is a good idea and would appeal to you? or evem the more experienced pilots as I am only new to the RC plane scene myself. any other ideas for this would also be greatly appreciated so if you can think of any other features you'd like to see added please don't hesitate to say so Many Thanks Benjamin