| English | ÅëëçíéêÜ | |||||
| Aircraft Recognition and Tracking Device |
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| Project | |||||
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| Equipment | |||||
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| The equipment of the system we developed, is divided by its nature into two categories: external and iternal. External equipment, which someone can handle directly in a natural way, includes a camera, a servo motor, a keyboard, a mouse and a joystick. Internal equipment is as important as the external equipment, and includes the computer system software and hardware. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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External Equipment Camera / Canon VB-C50FSi The main features of the camera, exploited by our system are: - color image in day mode - high resolution up to 768 x 576 pixels - high frame rate up to 25 fps (frames per second) - high speed and reliable data transfer over Ethernet 100Base-TX (ÉÅÅÅ 802.3u) at 100 Mbit/s (12.5 MB/s) - high optical zoom 26x - low weight of about 530 g Despite the multiple connection camera capability, only a single connection was necessary for this work and it was established via Ethernet cabling and communication protocols based on TCP / IP, HTTP, WV-HTTP. The image resolution was set at 384 x 288 pixels for faster calculations; this fact does not mean that the system does not work at higher resolutions. The frame rate was constantly set at 25 fps, while the zoom was variable to cover the maximum number of possible positions of the objects and to better represent the targets being tracked. There are no constraints on power consumption, due to the direct mains supply. We used, therefore, an AC adapter and not the PoE (Power over Ethernet) technology. Servo Motor / Directed Perception (now FLIR Motion Control Systems) PTU-D46-70 The most important, in relation to our system, features of the servo motor are: - high speed two-dimensional movement up to 60°/sec without load - high movement accuracy with an error of 0.003° - large movement margins up to 360° on the horizontal axis and up to 111° on the vertical axis - diect (on-the-fly) transitions on speed and acceleration - durable construction capable of working under bad weather conditions - high load carrying capacity of up to 4.08 kg, which exceeds the needs of 530 g of the selected camera The servo motor, although it has many advantages, also has the following disadvantage: - low speed and unreliable serial data transfer over RS-232 with speeds up to 38.4 Êbps For the good behavior of the system, the data rate was set at 19.2 Kbps instead of the higher bound of 38.4 Kbps, because in that mode problems arose. The noise on the line was handled at software level. Joystick / Microsoft® Sidewinder Force Feedback 2 Joystick The joystick, although it is included in the necessary equipment, does not pose any constraints since it is used in simple functions. Of course, the more the available buttons, the more the incorporated functions can be. On the selected joystick, the lever was used for the manual two-dimesional movement of the servo motor-camera system on the two axes, horizontal (right-left / pan) and vertical (up-down / tilt). Its buttons was used to control the zoom of the camera and the motion of the servo motor. The connection to the computer system was established via a USB cable. The joystick required an external power supply of AC 100-240 V, 1.0 A, 50-60 Hz. |
 Camera  Servo Motor  Joystick |
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Internal Equipment The internal equipment, which is equally important and necessary for the system to be operational, is the environment in which we built our system. The term "environment" means the necessary software for operating the system and the necessary hardware on which the software executes. Throughout the design and testing of various algorithms, we used many software applications: from Matlab®/Simulink® and LabVIEW™ in order to program our system core, to Visual Studio® and Eclipse™ to build auxiliary applications, under the Windows® operating system. Concerning the hardware, we tested our system on two laptops of unequal power. The following tables summarize the characteristics of the internal equipment.
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