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Comment by dharma1 | Hacker News Reader

OP's video doesn't really have anything to do with drones as such, just loads an mp4 of drone footage. The fact that it's drone footage is completely incidental.

But lots of people are doing real computer vision and object tracking on drones and robots, and have been doing for years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj-5RNdUz3I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqzMSxBOV-U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C95bngCOv9Q

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I know. I was specifically addressing the "follow me" class of drones mentioned that are getting a lot of press these days such as airdog, hexoplus, 3dr IRIS+ (all APM:Copter based) and no one outside university or military settings that I know of have really integrated that data back into the flight controller as well as the skydio demo suggests.

Unless they've had a massive and sudden change of heart, Airdog is based on the PX4/NuttX stack, not on the APM:Copter.

Sorry, it gets confusing since APM:Copter autopilot (I guess that's what they are calling it now) can run on PX4 hardware running NuttX too. So they are using the full PX4 flight stack as well?

Yep, although as I understand it they've worked so hard on it since the Kickstarter I'm not sure how much is still recognisable as the core ETH code. At the very least their software is rooted firmly in the PX4/Lorenz design ethos. One of the guys behind the project is also the author of some very nice PX4 and MAVLink tools which you may well have used: https://github.com/DrTon

[we have a nightmare at work trying to distinguish between original PX4FMU running PX4, Pixhawks running PX4, and Pixhawks running APM codebase in conversations]

Ah, I have seen DrTon's commits on the project. He has been rather prolific in the last several months. I'd love to connect with you outside of HN and hear what you are working on. Shoot me an email (in profile) if you see this.

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