DroneTracker

trigonometry, kafka, and drone tracking walk into a bar

What's this?

This program controls AXIS cameras supporting VAPIX to track drones and record video of the drones. It has been customized for NC State's AERPAW program.

Program Stack

Configuration Options

These options are all in config.yml.

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/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/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/zoom_error	How much space to have outside of the zoom (1.2 has 20% more space, 0.8 has 80% of the space)
camera/lead	The amount of seconds to lead the drone based on its velocity.
camera/move	Whether the camera should actually be connected to. If false, the camera_login section of the config is not required to be set.
camera/store_recordings	The path to store the exported recordings in,
camera/stop_recording_after	The amount of time after the last packet is received from Kafka before the recording should be stopped and the camera deactivated
drone/x, drone/y, drone/z	The size of the drone (height, width, depth)
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.
camera_login/ip, camera_login/username, camera_login/password	The ip, username, and password of the camera.
kafka/ip	The ip of the Kafka server to connect to for both command and data updates
kafka/data_topic, kafka/command_topic	The topics the program should receive data and command information from, respectively
kafka/hz	The amount of times per second to check for updates on both data and command streams
logs	The log level of the program. Valid options: "debug" "info" "warning" "error"

Utilities

Utility Purpose	Description
`cameracontroller.py`	A simple test program that will attempt to connect to and control the camera using the keyboard.
`submit_info.py`	A program to send a certain latitude, longitude and altitude to the camera a certain amount of times with a certain amount of delay in between each packet.
`test_submit.py`	A program that is the same as `submit_info.py`, except it sends close, random positions around the camera. You will need to manually edit the file to set these parameters.

Running

This program is designed to be run in a Dockerfile.

Use Docker Compose to build: sudo docker compose build && sudo docker compose up -d