Deep Drone v2

In my last post I discussed my little flying object detector project that I’ve been doing for fun. While it worked it relied on communication with an external laptop in order to work (the on board odroid was not powerful enough to run the convnet model).

Hence, what better excuse to buy an NVIDIA Jetson TK1 dev board which should have more than enough juice to run everything on board the drone itself. As added benefit it should come in useful for my litter robot. I then added websocket support to the flask web app and you can now see the detections appear in real time on a map.

It took some fiddling to get the wifi to work with the Jetson and Im still surprised at how quickly the wifi degrades (even though Im using the 5GHz band to avoid collisions with the Tx/Rx). But it did work in the end:

It wasn’t the best place to test it out but I was short on time and it should be good enough to illustrate the concept

Still lots to do and too little time, but we keep chipping away. In particular the awesome folk from ErleBotics were kind enough to send me a Brain2, looking forward to try that out as well.

–Dirk

PS: on a related note, love what the guys from vertical.ai are working on

Deep Drone: A Flying Object Detector with caffe, dronekit, and zeromq

About a year and a half ago I saw Jetpac’s video of their Spotter app and I remember thinking at the time that it would be so cool to get this flying on a drone. I didn’t have the bandwidth to work on it at the time but ended up poking at it with Markus Aschinger at the ASI and with two A level students (Jawad / Isaac) from the Nuffield Foundation. While they did good work and it got me a step closer, it still hadn’t quite come together. Hence I sat down the past week to do a full rewrite, integrate it with a quad I had lying around and do a little demo. The result can be seen in the video below.

Drone Based Metal Detector: Proof of concept

The last in a series of 3 posts (one, two) around the UAV based GPR system I have been working on.

There are many applications for GPR but the one I have been focussing on the most has been landmine and UXO detection. GPR is a popular sensor for this but by no means the only one. From big complex neutron sources to small thermal cameras and magnetometers a wide variety of sensors have been developed to detect landmines.

While we were focussing on GPR I wanted to explore what other sensors we could mount or fly alongside the GPR and that could provide a complimentary picture. This then crystallised into a summer project for Skycap intern Alex Davey. After some in-depth research into the spectrum of relevant sensors the decision was made to experiment with an active EMI sensor (i.e., metal detector).

An Exploration into Swarming

Besides the machine learning angle discussed in the previous post, the UAV based GPR system that I have been working on has involved an interesting foray into robot swarming technology. The reason being that the sensor places a number of restrictions on the operation of the aerial robot. In particular the swath that can be covered in one pass is rather limited. There are different routes to ameliorating that and one of them is the use of multiple drones to increase coverage rates.

MSF Canada Drone Day

I recently had the honour of attending the MSF Canada AGM in Montreal to join Ivan Gayton and Stephen Mather (from Open DroneMap fame) run a drone day for the MSF logisticians. The aim being to show the realm of the possible with current drone technology as well as touch on future trends and ethical considerations.

A second agenda we had was to promote the democratisation of drone technology to enable crowd sourced imagery collection as part of the Missing Maps initiative. More specifically, the goal is to bring drone technology down to a level where it can be built, maintained, and operated safely, responsibly, and independently by a local high school in South Sudan, the local University of Lubumbashi, or similar. 

The full (draft) concept note behind this can be found here.

UAViators: The Humanitarian UAV Network

Given my activity in the general Tech4Good space and autonomous systems I could not let Patrick’s announcement slide without doing a little post here to help spread the word.

The Autonomous Systems Showcase

Last week I attended the Autonomous Systems Showcase event at the University of Southampton. The focus of the event was to bring together industry, government and academia “to explore commercial and research opportunities to deliver the next generation of aerospace, marine, defence and other advanced systems technology to keep the UK at the forefront of these important industries“.

Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts, delivered the opening keynote. Other speakers included Sir Brian Burridge, Vice President of Strategic Marketing at Finmeccanica UK, and Michael Pickwoad, Production Designer from Dr Who, who talked about his creative process and the relationship between science and fiction.

The event also included industry and university showcase stands with particular emphasis on the work Southampton has done, and is doing, around unmanned aerial vehicles and underwater devices.

Drones for Humanity and Drone User Group Network UK

One liner summary: If you are interested in applying drone/UAV technology (or are already doing so) to humanitarian/social/conservation related problems, and you live in the UK. then get in touch.

I have worked with drones quite extensively in the past, including some work with the BBC, and still do in various ways now. I have to say, though, that I dislike the term drone and much prefer to use the term UAV or UAS. But that’s a different story.

I have also always had an interest in international development, social issues, and education. This has led to me running numerous Random Hacks of Kindness events, giving talks on ICT4D, and volunteering as a STEM Ambassador. I recently organized a NodeCopter event with the local Makerspace and have talked about UAV technology to groups as diverse as 11-13 year olds to The Ladies Luncheon Club where the average age is 65.

Inspired by the recent DroneConference in the US, a coffee with the founder of ShadowView, and the enthusiasm of the UAV guy at Doctors Without Borders, I am now looking to reach out to similar minded people and see if maybe we can set up a Drone User Group chapter here in the UK? Founded in the US by Timothy Reuter, their tagline is: Promoting the Use of Civilian Drone Technology for the Benefit of Humanity. They also recently announced a drone social impact award. I contacted Timothy and he was very supportive of the idea.

UAVs meet Node.js – NodeCopter comes to Southampton on 10 Aug

I have always been a fan of autonomous flying machines, particular their civilian applications, and through my past work at the University I have been fortunate to be able to work on the design and building of UAVs. I have also been a keen attender of various meetups and hackathons .

I was therefore immediately sold when I heard about the Node Copter concept: getting together and see what you can make a Parrot AR Drone do by the end of the day using node.js. Best explained by video:

I got in touch with Benjie (from So Make It) and Andy Nesbitt (who has run a number of these) asking them if they were interested in helping organize one in Southampton.

Both responded with a “hell yeah!” and after some prep Im happy to announce that you can should sign up on the Eventbrite page:

The event will be held at the makerspace itself. There is a small attendance charge to avoid people signing up but not turning up.

Some prior coding experience (in whatever language) is required.

See you there!

Dirk

DECODE Mark VI UAV test flight

A bit late after the fact but I have been meaning to do a short post about the latest UAV test flight. A new airframe was developed as part of the European 2Seas 3i project. 2Seas is an EU funded project looking at high reliability UAVs for civil and maritime surveillance.

Its a twin petrol engine aircraft with twin carbon fibre booms, an H-tail and modular payload pod. These pods can be specified to carry a range of cameras and overall endurance can be 12 hours or more. Twin on-board generators maintain the avionics capability for extended duration flights. All up weight is about 20kg.