Week 8: How The Drone Net Works - Software Pt. 2 - Basic Motion Detection

Hello Everyone! This week, the team decided to ditch the experimental design where we fly our drones in front of the Drone Net. Instead, we will simply set up the device and leave it to acquire data from the airspace around ERAU. Honestly, there is far less paperwork to file when doing it this way, and the airspace is crowded enough that we probably gather as much data as we need.

This week, I would like continue my discussion of the software side of the Drone Net.

How does the Drone Net software detect flying object?

In a somewhat basic sense, a motion detector is any device that can determine when an input signal is changing and locate the source of the deviation.

In the case of the drone net, let us imagine the path of information from the cameras to the final screen:

1) Two cameras [1 infrared & 1 color] capture video of the sky constantly. Then, the cameras send all individual frames of the video to a small computer called "The Jetson."
2) The Jetson computer sends the frames to its software, humbly called "motion_detector."
3) The motion_detector program takes each frame and compares it to the previous frame and marks the differences. If the differences are great enough and look close enough to a drone, the program says that there was motion, and saves the frame as a picture inside of another folder.

The whole system repeats these steps 30 times per second. After the pictures are saved, the research team members go back and verify the truth of the software. We manually mark each frame that was saved as either a "drone", "plane", "bird", "bug" or "nothing".

Next week, I will explain the why the team has to manually identify the objects captured by the motion detector.