If this has already been answered, by all means please point me to it.
I am in the process of building a quadcopter which I eventually plan to run autonomously by allowing it to track an object and take a video feed of it moving.
GPS is one of the options I've considered, basically:
- GPS antena on moving object (person, car, bike, surfer)
- GPS antena on quadcopter
- Radio to transmit coordinates from moving object to quad copter
Some of the challenges I can foresee are
- Line of sight for camera. How does the camera know exactly where to point?
- Angle, how can I pre-program the quad to always record, say... 10m to the right of the moving object, or even better, program a set of angles to record from whilst keeping up with the object
- GPS accuracy, what happens if the GPS lock is weak?
What are some of my other options? I saw this TED Talk where the quads are following a ball shaped sensor? I believe it uses Kinect cameras and lots of them which is not really an option for this challenge.
So I'm open to hearing some ideas before I start research and development of these features.