OCRDrone is a NodeJS application written for a NodeCopter demonstration.
OCRDrone uses the drone's video camera to continuously save camera footage to the filesystem, passing each image to nodecr for text recognition. If the text is recognised as a valid command, it is then translated into flight commands and sent to the drone in real-time.
You can see a short video of this application being demoed at NodeCopter Southampton. (Skip through to 12:10).
Here's another video of exactly the same demo, created by stitching together all the images captured by this application. This is what OCRDrone sees and processes.
ar-drone - http://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone:
npm install ar-dronenodecr - http://github.com/joscha/nodecr:
npm install nodecrThe following applications also need to be downloaded and installed on your system. NOTE: the executable binaries of each must be available in your system path.
tesseract: http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr
ffmpeg: http://ffmpeg.org/download.html
node ocrDrone.js-
Although it is possible to show text to drone's camera using a laptop/tablet, we found that text printed on paper worked much better.
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The longer the text/command, the better the match. We found that tesseract preferred "LAND PLEASE" to just "LAND".
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It appears that the video stream can only be consumed by one application. So, if you're capturing the onboard video with another application, then you might get TcpVideoStream errors from OCRDrone.
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Occasionally, we got TcpVideoStream errors when starting the application. Pressing Ctrl+C and restarting the application a couple of times eventually got it working. Sometimes we had to disconnect/reconnect to the WiFi.
I'd be interested in hearing about any usages of or any ideas stemming from this application.