October 29, 2013

Quadrotor copter with machine vision for contest

by flight-machine

This page gives brief overview of multirotor UAV platform called “Tau”, which is built specially for participating in flying robots contest which is established by Russian Croc company. For now contest has only russian participants, probably because it was made for a first time.

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Our team name was “Autonomous aerospace”. We are from Krasnoyarsk, 1M people city in Siberia. We had experience in UAV airplane development and manufacturing. We’ve grew up from student and postgraduate student university (SFU) scientific team to startup company.

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February 10, 2012

Introducing the River View Web Player & Other News from River Studies

by M@sh

It has been a long while since my last blog entry in regards to river view panoramas. In the meantime the recording setup runs basically stable (putting aside minor problems with loose connectors) even under rough conditions (see also the gallery “Making Of” at the end of this post).

I just came back from artist-in-residency stays in Varanasi/Benares and Guwahati in India, that enabled me to have a few extensive recording sessions on various vessels like house boats, motor and rowing boats on Ganges River – for one the most sacred river to Hindus and probably most worshipped river on the planet, next to being one of the most polluted rivers of the world – and Brahmaputra River in Assam.

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November 30, 2010

Elphel as a line-scan camera (for river panoramas)

by M@sh

In my search for an affordable and reasonable solution of creating high-res panoramic river views I came along the Elphel camera and it’s photo-finish mode. As part of my ongoing projects Danube Panorama Project, Nile Studies and the new umbrella project River Studies, I am capturing virtually endless panoramic river views from a moving vessels with a slit- or line-scan method. I was using webcams or DV-cameras before, and all possible ways to upgrade to higher resolutions either seemed clumsy (I don’t want to be loaded with much more than a tiny laptop or tablet and the camera itself), very processing intense and/or expensive and far out of reach of my (very limited) budget.

The “all-purpose camera” Elphel stepped in as a good, reasonable and flexible solution for that task. The first season using an Elphel353 is over, so time to share some of my experiences with Elphel and it’s not so well know photo-finish mode for line-scanning.

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August 4, 2010

SCINI Takes Elphel Under Antarctic Ice

by David

The Submersible Capable of under-Ice Navigation and Imaging (SCINI) is an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) designed to facilitate oceanographic science research in extreme polar environments.  The project was part of a three year grant, starting in 2007, from the National Science Foundation aiming to develop a cost-effective research tool that can be easily deployed through a 20cm hole in the ice.  Over the past three austral summers, field teams led by benthic ecologist Dr. Stacy Kim and SCINI inventor Bob Zook, took the ROV into the cold southern waters surrounding McMurdo Station, Antarctica to capture video from parts of the natural world that have never been seen before.
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