quantumbagel/cameradistance

A drone-following script for NC State's AERPAW drones.

CameraDistance

A drone-following script for NC State's AERPAW drones

Disclaimer: This guide is written for Linux users. This program should work great on all operating systems, just adapt as necessary.

What does this do?

This program controls AXIS cameras supporting VAPIX to track MavLink/ArduPilot drones and record video of the drones.

Its features include

• Customizable recording triggers
• Can zoom to fit drone in view or with a certain amount of space around it
• Can handle drone software crashes or disconnects and quickly recover
• Can support as many drones as you need via config
• Works with any AXIS PTZ camera supporting VAPIX or any ArduPilot/MavLink based drone and many more!

Configuration Options

Configuration Option	Description
camera/alt	The altitude (from sea level) for the camera's lens.
camera/lat, camera/long	The latitude and longitude of the camera's lens.
camera/radius_activate	The maximum radius that the drone can be for the camera to be active
camera/offset	The camera's offset from north (clockwise)
camera/deactivate_pos/pan, camera/deactivate_pos/tilt	The pan/tilt to deactivate the camera to when it is not in use.
camera/min_step	The minimum change in the pan/tilt (degrees) from the camera's current position for the program to send an update
camera/min_zoom_step	The minimum change in the zoom cycles from the camera's current zoom for the program to send an update
camera/wait	The delay between ticks. 0 should be fine, but if you are running on an old CPU, 0.1 will lower usage drastically
camera/activate_method	How to detect if the camera should be recording. armed: when the drone arms/disarms, file: when the file 'record' starts with a 1 or 0, start/stop recording, relative-height: you must put "relative-height5" or a number.
camera/delay	The delay after the program detects it should not be recording for the camera to stop recording.
camera/maximum_zoom	The maximum zoom of the camera.
camera/is_upside_down	Is the camera upside down?
camera/zoom_error	How much space to have outside of the zoom (1.2 has 20% more space, 0.8 has 80% of the space)
drone/address	The drone addresses. Format: name: [prefix, start port, number of ports to check sequentially]
drone/x, drone/y, drone/z	The size of the drone (height, width, depth)
drone/msg_timeout	The timeout of the camera's messages to connect to the drone
scale/dist, scale/width	At 1x zoom, looking straight ahead, the camera's horizontal FOV at dist meters away is width. This has been calibrated for the AXIS Q-8615E PTZ camera.
login/ip, login/username, login/password	The ip, username, and password of the camera.
debug	The log level of the program. 0 is none, 1 is normal, 2 is debug.

Installation Guide

You can either run this locally or inside a Docker container.

Running Locally

Enter the directory, and run pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Change config.yaml's options to what you want.

Then, just run python3 dronetracker.py and you should be good!

Running in a Dockerfile

Make sure Docker is installed.

Change config.yaml's options to what you want.

Then, enter the project directory and run this one liner: sudo docker compose build && sudo docker compose up -d You should be good to go!

If Things Don't Go Right

Just open an issue! I am active and will try my best to help with fixing your issue!

cameradistance's Issues

Config camera.offset parameter doesn't function

I'm trying to put a 45 degree offset on the camera movement, however when editing the camera.offset parameter in config.yml, I don't see any change in how the camera is pointed. There is no difference in the pan of the camera between an offset of 0 and 45 (assuming the drone position is constant).

From what I understand, the camera.offset parameter is for offsetting the pan (tell me if this is wrong) of the camera. My specific problem is that when a drone is directly south of the camera, the camera is instead pointing southeast. So, I am trying to enforce a 45 degree offset to correct this. For the record, I don't think this is an issue with the camera incorrectly calculating the pan as the pan printing in the console when running with debug output seems correct. I think that it's just that the camera is not mounted facing north, hence the offset is needed.

Here is a screenshot of the relevant portion of my config file: