Borek said:
This is what I wished to add support for to the firmware (so they would be able to use the forward optical camera to detect/avoid obstacles, plus store the area of the obstacles+their velocity, so it could guess where they are after it flies past them.)
Borek said:
DJI drones have no LIDAR yet as far as I know they do have some obstacle detection capabilities based on the image processing (never risked tested it though, even if I am flying one).
The best available is DJI's obstacle avoiders that use bulky lasers (not LIDAR, my bad,) to detect how close it is in that exact direction to an obstacle. They have the scan width of pencils and there is no memory, so once objects leave the extremely narrow field of view of those laser sensors, the aircraft is unable to avoid the obstacles. Also, only the very large and expensive drones have sensors that point up/down/left/right/forward/backwards. They also have no memory and no way to estimate where objects will be from velocity, because they just say what is the range to the closest object in that direction, with the laser range-finders.
Borek said:
EMF from motors doesn't sounds viable to me. You have a motor emitting EMF noise, an EMF detector near the motor (so bathed in the noise) and you want the detector to detect signal reflected from an obstacle that is quite likely just something small and organic (say branch/leaves). Reflected signal is pretty low, noise is pretty high - I can be wrong, but for me these things don't add up reliably.
I hoped to write assembly (x86-64 or aarch64,) FPGA or VHDL code to process the electrical load of the motors, because it will vary if the air pressure goes up. The air pressure will go up if that particular motor gets close to a wall. This will make it take more power from the battery, which is the data that I hoped could be processed by a fast algorithm to avoid obstacles.
Especially if the data from all of the motors is used together, it should be possible to make up for gaps the data would otherwise have (eg gyroscopes or other tools that tell the craft which way is up relative to itself, could help it had problems due to breezes/gusts that got mistook for walls. It could also use a compass to help tell which cases the load varied because of obstacles versus which cases varied due to the atmosphere.)
Where local authorities allow aircraft with mics, you could also add a mic to help it detect the waveforms that are reflected from nearby obstacles, with a circuit that is able to filter out the waveforms of the loud motors themselves, to copy how mammals (eg bats or whales) echolocate. It should be easy to make the firmware automatically take whatever data sources are available to give the best possible estimate of perfect behaviour (eg the software, if we make it, should work for all aircraft, whether they have all of these data sources or just some of them.) I will help make it for free if somebody is okay with remote work.
