Feasibility Study on Distant Target Positioning Using Aerial Image through Wi-Fi Communication

Abstract

The aim of this research is to develop an active system to determine the distance of an unknown target by the aerial image transmitted through Wi-Fi wireless communication and the calculation by Vicenty’s formulae This system includes on-board system on the aircraft and ground station The Ardupilot Mega 2 5 is used to provide aircraft navigation information and to maintain attitude stability also the aircraft coordinate information and the heading of aircraft provided by GPS module As the aircraft is in flight mode target pictures are taken continually by the onboard image capturing system The aircraft information is transmitted by the wireless system (Wi-Fi) to the ground station On ground station graphical user interface (GUI) which is written by Visual Basic integrates the GPS coordinate and target pictures that are sent down from the aircraft The specific pixels of the target picture are chosen manually in the GUI With the integrated information Vincenty’s formulae will then be utilized in the form of a MATLAB script to perform the interpolation Finally the results will be shown on the GUI The pixel deviation which is made by human operation and angle deviation caused by camera with different angle will affect the result The impact of angle deviation is also larger than pixel deviation In this research the aerial system that was developed to determine the distance of a target is not perfect It is affected by various condition of flight information such as attitude of aircraft and GPS error etc causing the results to be a little inaccurate Consequently there will be room for improvement in future study

Date of Award	2014 Aug 11
Original language	English
Supervisor	Wei-Hsiang Lai (Supervisor)