What drone to get

[w1ntervention]

I have always wanted an excuse to get a drone, and finally have one! I am looking for a drone that will hover above an indoor table, and take pictures of objects on that table at at least phone quality. Therefore, it would need to be programmable in order to detect the table (I have experience with computer vision, but i'm not sure how simple it is to just upload some python code say, and have the drone rotors / camera interact with it). It also needs a camera that can take pictures of things directly below it, while hovering - I don't need a front camera.

I have looked at several online, but have only been able to find ones that are controlled only via remote, or have great front cameras, but their bottom cameras are poor quality and used only for stabilizing.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I would consider building one myself, providing it would not take more than a month for a beginner to construct.

Thanks in advance.

 

[droneadmin]

Maybe a DJI spark what is your budget?

 

[betty]

Building by yourself will be hard if you have no friends help you. Better buy RTF one.

 

[OldGazer]

There are some things wrong here..

#1: Flying anything larger that your typical $10.00 drone or something like a TinyWhoop/Blade Inductrix indoors is unsafe and foolish. I have no doubt that several "experts" will disagree, but that does not change a thing.

#2. Televisions, cable set top boxes, DVD/BlueRay players, and sound systems are controlled with a remote. A radio controlled aircraft is controlled by a RADIO CONTROL TRANSMITTER, AKA RC Radio.

#3. For a beginner (whom I will assume does not know how to fly a multi-rotor aircraft (I refuse to use the "D" word, makes me want to puke...)) this is one very tall order. Even if I could find a suitable sensor suite to add to one of my existing aircraft, I seriously doubt I could pull this off in less than a month. Heck, just the flight testing and sensor suite to flight controller marriage testing would take at least 2 weeks, and that's only if nothing goes wrong...

Now before the masses get their collective knickers tied in knots, I'm not saying this cannot be done. What I am saying is that as a rank beginner, (and please don't take any offense) YOU cannot do this in under a month.

Think about it for a couple of minutes.. You need to choose a frame, motors, propellers, speed controllers, batteries, battery charger, a flight controller, RC radio equipment, telemetry transceiver radios for establishing the Ground Control System uplink/downlink communications, a 3 axis gimbal so the camera can be pointed down, a gimbal controller....

But before we can even begin to think about these things we need to get a handle on EXACTLY what you want this aircraft to be able to do, you need to know how much the aircraft will weigh with and without any "payload," and you need to have some idea as to how long you want the aircraft to fly on a battery.

 

[w1ntervention]

Thanks for the advice! Fully prepared to accept that building one is beyond me in my time frame.

The room is very spacious, without any radio devices nearby. However I was hoping to have it fly itself, extremely slowly into position, where it would hover.

I do have one other question - how do you go about "programming" them - is it a case of modifying the firmware or are some more friendly?

As for the budget, I wouldn't want to spend more than £400 but if the perfect one is over this, then so be it.

Thank you for your suggestions so far

 

[OldGazer]

Programming is not the correct term. What you are talking about is Mission Planning. In other words, instructing the aircraft to take off from point A (AKA the Home position), climb to a give altitude, fly to point B (AKA a Destination or a Way Point), Loiter at a given altitude for a specified amount of time, climb to a given altitude and the return to the Home Position (AKA RTH or RTL (Return to Launch point).

There are several flight controllers that will do this, Pixhawk, APM 2.x, NAZA, Eagle Tree Vector, and so on.

I prefer Pixhawk. In a multirotor, a Pixhawk "runs" on the ArduCopter firmware. The aircraft can be flown using a traditional RC transmitter, a computer running Mission Planner Ground Control System software, or you can use Mission Planner to plan a flight, upload the flight plan to the flight controller, and at the click of the mouse Pixhawk will arm the motors, switch to Auto mode and execute the mission.

With that being said, flying indoors will still be problematic, primarily from a GPS stand point, in that the quality of the received GPS signals will be impacted by signal reflections (AKA Mulit Pathing) caused by the walls, floor, ceiling, and any significant metal (steel girders, I-beams, re-bar, plumbing, etc.) within the structure. An additional source of interference, particularly with respect to the compass/magnetometer, would be the building electrical system.

This should get you started: http://ardupilot.org/copter/index.html

 

[w1ntervention]

mission planning is an option but as you say the gps signal would be weak. I was hoping to use computer vision to detect the table and visual odometery to determine position relative to the table, and then be able to fly to and hover a pre set distance above the centre of the table. Therefore no gps would be needed and the location of a table would be dynamically determined.

 

[OldGazer]

That's a tall order my friend, even for a Pixhawk.
A Pixhawk 2 (Cube) with a companion Edison computer may be better suited, but still, some of the required technology is still in its infancy, and the hardware that is available is very expensive.

 

[w1ntervention]

Thanks for your reply, I have been looking at pixhawk and it looks promising! Just to clear up my understanding - pixhawk will be compatible with certain quadcopters, and can monitor its acceleration / direction etc, but itself has little processing power. However, a raspberry pi (or other, more expensive options...) could be connected to the pixhawk and a camera, and do all the computer vision stuff (or send information / receive commands from a computer), pushing movement commands to the pixhawk.

Assuming my understanding is correct, what sort of aircraft would and wouldn't be suitable?