I am digging through hardware, and I am not sure how to best approach this problem. I am the hardware guy, the software guys will be putting together the complex vision based stuff, but I want to select the correct hardware to make everyone’s lives a bit easier.
The goal is to build a vision based autonomous flight system that can pilot the drone. A 2 axis gimbal is needed, and I will be building a scanning flight plan in Q ground control. So the drone will take off in autopilot to a waypoint and enter a routine where the gimbal and drone are scanning an area. When the vision based system identifies the object of interest, it needs to accurately report the orientation relative to the drone position and take the angle of the camera into account. So in a search and rescue scenario, the precise location (not worried about distance, just angle and azimuth) of the object of interest can be reported back to the base station. (can this be easily displayed on the Q-ground control GUI? I’ve used mission planner previously, but this is different than projects I’ve done in the past.)
Hardware selection I have: This drone is a 550 or 650 class quad with 12-15” props. The camera weight is ~400g and will need to have a USB3 cable attached to go back to the onboard image processing (Nvidia Jetson)
The hardware that I need help selecting: 2 Axis gimbal system that has some way of reporting back the angular position. I see some gimbals with their own IMU, some with absolute position encoders and some that are just confusing about what the include or if I need to glue my own encoder on there? What is the most accurate / best way to do this in PX4? Budget is around $3k for the gimbal and associated controllers / sensors. I am looking for hardware recommendations, and a very brief work flow to get the camera telemetry data into mavlink and back to the base station. Links to tutorials and How to’s would be appreciated as well.