How To Make Autonomous Following Drone

Question

Hello... I'm Ankur, Studing IT Engineering in INDIA .

I want to make a Drone / Quadcopter That Recognize me And Follow me Around....

I Also Want to Add Movements to dorne Performed by My Hand Gestures...

I have Heard of Raspberry Pi And arduino...

Which will be Suitable For This Project among Both?

Will it Work Good If i use OPENCV For Person or Object Tracking....?

Will OpenCv Work in RealTime With Raspberry Pi or Arduino Uno...

What Programming Language I Should Know?

How do i Start from scratch?

What Are The Equipment i will be needing InThis Project..?

Reply ASAP!

Please! GUIDE Me i came with lots Of hope...

Thank You..

ANKUR KUMAR

My Email : kankurcool@gmail.com

Jan Cumps · Answer

The first commercial company that tried this (and didn't deliver anything), Lily Drones, went bankrupt with many milions of money from preorders and even more milions from angel investors, in their pocket. The company who bought their assets is now trying to take down any blog or youtube video that refers to Lily Drones via trade mark claims. This will not be an easy project

jw0752 · Answer

Hi Ankur, The functions that you are looking for are very complex and if possible are surely on the border of what is technically possible at this time. I do not want to discourage you but the only way I know to begin to accomplish your goals is to start slow and break the problem down into simpler pieces. Get yourself an Arduino and begin to learn how to make it interact with the world. Learn how it gets its sensory input. Learn how it can manipulate that input and produce an output. Learn how to couple that output to an actuator that creates an action in the real world. As you experiment you will come across different sensors and actuators that could fit into what you want to do. I have answered you as I want you to know I am interested in seeing you accomplish your goal but I also sense from you question that you may not realize just how much work and experimentation might be needed to accomplish it. As you go through the process you should post what you are learning on the e14 web site as you will get helpful observations in the comments. You can also ask specific questions and get helpful feedback. The question that you asked today is probably too broad to get much response. John

balearicdynamics · Answer

Ankur, I split your question title in two parts.

Autonomous - It is a mess, not easy as many of the technologies involved probably are not so affordable and easy to access at the date for a cheap DIY device.

Follow - This is a totally different stuff. The two components you mention probably are sufficient to make the brain and the legs (or wings?) of your drone. You can find a lot of Arduino based drone projects and carrying a Raspberry Pi device on it (communicating with the Arduino) you have more than the needed processing power to manage a follow-me device.

There are a lot of commercial approaches now on the market so you can be inspired by the specifications of some of these, just google follow me drone. Then you should play with different project integration and sure put your hands in the challenge

But I see this more than possible.

Enrico

DAB · Answer

Check out the Ben Heck Show episode where he made the luggage that followed him. You can glean a lot of useful ideas from that show. DAB

Jan Cumps · Answer

In this case they had soooo much cash that only design issues are an explainable cause. More than 100 milion American Dollars from other people. For free. And they were engineers. If they couldn't do it with that budget, what can the original poster achieve with probably a fraction of the resources? this wasn't a crowdfunding project. The money came from online pre-orders.

beacon_dave · Answer

There is also a free short course running on Futurelearn starting this week which may be of interest to you, especially if you plan to use camera-based object tracking in you project.

Robotic Vision: Principles of Vision:

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/robotic-vision-principles?lr=2

It's the first of three courses in this subject area created by Queensland University of Technology.

beacon_dave · Answer

This also surely depends a lot on the actual requirements specification of the projects, which are a bit vague at the moment. People might be assuming too much here.

If we look at:

I want to make a Drone / Quadcopter That Recognize me And Follow me Around...

then I seem to recall Holger Buss achieving this basic functionality about five years ago simply by carrying a beacon which the MikroKopter drone was able to use to establish his position. Here is a more recent video of his from a couple of years ago showing a drone following him whilst he is riding a bicycle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoiwxVJAr8M

Without more details on the specification then we do not know at this stage if the recognition requires to be able to differentiate between randomly selected identical twins dressed in identical clothing in a crowd of 10,000 people outdoors in a thunderstorm from a distance of 500m with 99.99% accuracy; or if it just needs to differentiate between two specific people in a room on their own, wearing different coloured t-shirts indoors under controlled lighting etc. with a 60% accuracy; which the likes of a Charmed Labs Pixy camera

Pixy (CMUcam5) – Charmed Labs

could probably achieve out-of-the-box.

As for gestures, I've just been watching some videos posted back in 2013 of student projects on Bruce Land's Cornell ece4760 Atmel AVR based microcontroller course

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXOBDE8XvH0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1lSoTNKzfQ

One is camera based, the other uses flex sensors on a glove, and they appear to be quite functional.

beacon_dave · Answer

Another tip might be to take a look at what other people are already doing in this area. There is a similar project going on here: Computer Vision Drone which appears to use a Raspberry Pi with OpenCV. Some videos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ-goAtbEVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCdacGMnlO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjJ5Lil4hq0