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Comment by xaedes | Hacker News Reader

Won't be easy, drones are small and fast.

RGB based detection will probably be too slow and error prone. Rather put active IR LEDs or similar markings which can be easily detected, use cameras which only let through IR and high framerate! Then use computer vision to spot blobs. Finally compute 3D position by triangulation.

Active IR tracking is still pretty much State of the Art for motion capturing and the like.

Short googling leads to OptiTrack, where they even advertise exactly this use case of drone tracking:

https://optitrack.com/applications/robotics/

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I'll never understand why computer vision is the first-choice tracker. It's easily the worst sensor for most tracking tasks, which is why it receives so much funding / publication / publicity when it works.

If you really want to track drones, you'd use radar, radio, and GPS combined with a good imu + transmitter on the drone. Off the shelf systems exist for this application when tracking your own drones / those you can "attach lightweight systems to"

I think it's just humans having human biases.

"I know where things are mainly by looking at them continuously, so it seems logical that if a computer can capture images, it should be doing the same."

most people can't actually look at something continuously. There are blinks and saccades our brain filters out.

You're not wrong, but I wasn't speaking using this level of specificity.

They also don't look at things continuously for psychological reasons like being bored, sensory reasons like being distracted by something else, physical reasons like having their line of sight blocked, social reasons such as the event ending, or biological reasons like being asleep or deceased.

And neither would computers be looking at things continuously, if anything the discontinuity would be even more obvious as computers use "frames" of processing, as well as camera shutter speeds, instead of just being a function of the overall system's response time.

Cameras are cheap and readily available, can detect most objects that humans are interested in and don't depend on having access to modify the objects you want to track.

Optical tracking suddenly is a very nice option if you cannot tinker with the object being tracked.

Source: my old employer does tracking and well, try getting a tag into a football, basketball, or ice hockey puck. it's hard.

OP specifically said that they can tinker with the drones in this case. But I hear you, when you can't and the environment is structured it can work.

Still the first question should always be: Can we instrument the object.

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