This SOLOSHOT is now being sold on the net. It works by attaching a TAG on the person/car, and when the TAG holder moves, the camera will track him at incredible speed.
see how it works
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEgASKIv54A
Did anyone try to hack this system ? how it works? can we do something similar with Adrduino. Do not waste time on the distance(range) because this follows the transmitter power. Focus on the concept ? what is the simplest way to get 2 servos to follow ?
It appears to be differential GPS, a zigbee, or something similar communicates back the GPS data and they compare data. If you are indoors (or close range) then you need something different.
If you wish to do something fairly close (withing 20’ and no obstructions) then you can do something fairly simple with ultrasonics. I am just now working on tracking a person speaking which works similar to the way people track sounds, but that is a different kettle of fish.
Note also that there are triangulation schemes that require several fixed devices.
hmm…interesting comment. it did not cross my mind to ask if soloshot works indoors or not…if its a GPS, then it won’t work in a GPS deprived or cloudy weather…Ultrasonic sounds intriguing…within 20 ft is great for creative photography and movie production. Trangulation would be quite a challenge. I will search the net if someone shared any project like that…
There are a few commercial products out there, and I believe they all work on RF. For us to do that, timing RF inputs is a challenge. Since sound travels so much slower, to do this with sound is easier. You do have to deal with obstructions and possibly echos…
However, I don’t see this as much use in creative photography. Good composition in a photograph is seldom a centered one.
An indoor tracking project indoors would probablybe easier with a Kinect, or with a regular camera and OpenCV. However, if you do go that route where you need triangulation I can work out most of the programming for you, it’s an interesting enough project where I would donate that…
Also, during WWII, there were a number of schemes to keep the bombers on track, both side developed their measures and counter measures. You may wish to look into some of these old school methods.
Two GPS station, one is fixed and one is mobile. The mobile one sends its coords at the station, and the station, which knows its exact location(averaged over a running average of 10minutes worth of samples), corrects the error of the coords on the data sent by the mobile gps. Then, having two points on a plane, it calculates the angle, and moves the camera to that angle.
A refinement of that is to use a PID filter to predict next point knowing the previous points; Any movement will also fit on a bezier curve, so having 3 points you can make a smooth curve using the zoom. It could work also without any refinement at all, since all this processing is done in the milliseconds range, so it appears smooth in the video.
This reminds me of a black & white movie where two police cars each carrying a recption antenna, following a moving target which has a radio beacon fixed on it by one of their informers. As both cars report the direction of the antenna that gives them best signal from the beacon, the inspector at the station keeps trangulating on the map untill they caught the target. That was one hell of an inetersting idea for those days. Anyone here remebers the name of that movie ?
I thought the easy way to do this would be to put a beacon on the user, either infrared, ultraviolet, radio, etc, then have one or two sensors looking for the maximum signal direction. If needed, the controller could look for a specific set of pulses that identify the tag. Pretty much the same as a solar tracker.
Also this would be a way to lead a robot to a charging station.
