Testing III

     This time we wanted to try if our drone can flies properly calculating the mid-point of power lines and automatically follows the right direction. To demonstrate better the process, we used another drone to film the tested drone's route.

The golden one is for testing and the silver one is for filming

Here is the video on Youtube: 

     Because the battery of the drones only last approx. 20 mins so we couldn't finished the testing and the filming. We had a lots of problems before the filming of this video. First of all, we don't know what was happening with the golden drone which often had some trouble with it's camera that is always looking down before the take off and couldn't take off neither. This problem we had recently solved by updating the software. Secondly, as you can see in the video, the wind direction also affects the quality of shooting. Hoping a better outcome we are going to come back another day.

Process III

     The other day we failed our system in the detection of power lines on the road. So our team had made some improvements on the application mainly on the first image processing. The comparison below shows perfectly how our team could removed those noises made by the road: 

     Thanks to this development, at the term of detection of power lines could worked without any problem. As you guys can observe on the picture below, basically those power lines are well detected and some lines formed by some small noises are recognized too. 

     But those small lines are not effecting the final result of line detection. On this picture is shown the last development, the power lines are clearly noted and you can see a red circle and a blue line, each of them presents the midpoint of three power lines detected and the direction which the drone would followed. 

     To conclude, we are so exited about this brilliant result, we are not only done with the ground but also with the road now! That means that our application is almost done! Of course we are missing some testings more!

Guang(left) and Juan Wu(right) was preparing for the testing

Testing II

This is Guang testing with his iPhone and the remote control

     Previously we were testing our program on the soil, but this time we had chosen a place with the road shown. This summer in Texas is extremely hot, the sunlight burns and always when we go out for testing it's like a torture. However the drone can detect the power lines perfectly under this circumstances.

     The first picture shows the original image captured by the drone, with that on the program we can do the image processing to some important lines shown on the picture. After all, the program should recognize which of those are power liner. But this time, apparently the result was not ideal as we had expect. 

Summary of the system

This chart mostly shows our basic operation of the drone

Testing I

First outdoor testing on our program with the drone

   
     This time we are here to tell you our progress of the first program testing. First of all, there still existed some bugs on the application since every time when we turned the drone on. In general, when the camera starts to capture the image, it should send back at least 3 pictures per second to do the whole process of image, line extraction, etc.. But when we tested it can't even send back one image per minute. So after all we stopped the testing and thinking of where that we'd done was wrong.

Process II

    Can't wait to telling you guys, we had solve the noises caused by the ground on the back! As we can see on the image, comparing with the previous one this time we could successfully achieved our objective. Now, we are hoping our next meeting for the first testing on our program with the drone. :)

     This is the screenshot obtained after the evolution of our program