OpenCV To RoboRealm - Jack Pender, Blog #7

Introduction:

Developing further on getting the camera feed from the Tello drone to a viewable format, it was decided to try and get the camera feed into RoboRealm. Once the camera feed is in RoboRealm, it can essentially be sent to anywhere from there, in our case Ubidots, but if this were to change we would now have a better starting point.

RoboRealm:

RoboRealm was created in 2006 to take advantage of lower cost generic computing, a widening range of lower cost imaging devices, an increasing need and usage of vision as a primary sensor device and the desire to come to a solution with an interactive user interface with minimal programming. This made it ideal for this project as it meant that for future iterations it would be quick and simple for someone else to get up and running with.

Procedure:

Using multiple of the built-in features of RoboRealm I created a programe that would start a screen capture in order to have RoboRealm capture the drone feed. Firstly, within an if statement so as to not create an infinite loop, I ran the python script to livestream the camera feed of the Tello drone. RoboRealm would then capture the part of the screen that the livestream was on, using Screen_Capture to set the correct coordinates. However, there was a compromise here. In order to still be able to react with RoboRealm I had to use the Screen_Capture for specific coordinates like I have stated, rather than simply a specific window. For this reason, the screen must be split into half and half, in my case with RoboRealm on the left and the livestream on the right. While not a perfect fix, it does the job for now and this will be something I look to improve upon in the future.

Conclusion:

Having the Tello camera feed displaying in RoboRealm is a great jumping off point now for this part of the project. It will allow us to send the livestream to various different platforms in the future, if necessary, but it also allows us to control the Tello via RoboRealm. This will be a useful fail safe to have for the Tello, as it means if the drone is behaving strange or erratically we can take control or just simply land it.