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Can a drone operate like the scanners from Half-Life 2, dispatched by alarm?

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rudeguy said:
It really wouldn't be all that hard. You would just have to have the mission software set a mission based on GPS waypoints. The software can already write waypoints in flight, so just code it so that it sets waypoints based on where the IR signature is.

Keep in mine the scanners were slow to respond. This would be near real time with just a bit of lag like the scanners had. Also I don't remember the scanners flying for hours. I'm currently working on getting the hex over the 30 minute mark for flight time and I *think* I can do it.

The fixed wing I'm working on will easily get over 60 minutes. I'm hoping to find a way to get 3 hours but I don't know if that is even possible. But I'm damn sure going to try.
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Won't say the make/model, but there's a certain military UAS system that has the capability to orient into the wind and minimize prop use, adjust surfaces minimally in response to airflow and just loiter.
 
The tech is currently there and in a form I expect this is possible at the hobby level. You're basically meshing two-three technologies that already exist.

Auto launch should be fairly simple.
Starting flight path should be fairly simple, program a path around the house on launch.

Detecting motion is fairly easy, existing security cam/software already does this. You would have to find a way to get the outputs to convert to a new flight path. This part would be tricky because the drone would have to process the data. I don't think that part is possible just yet. Maybe you could send the data to a nearby PC to process and get a new flight path but that seems all sorts of funky.
 
Thinking about it more, it would be much easier just to have the drone programmed to circle the house, or float between a few points. You have a known flight path and the drones could get much better angles than static cameras attached to the house (looking in vs. out). You might want to launch at least 2 drones to get front/back coverage, but this seems vastly easier than trying to track and follow.
 
Phoenix86 said:
Thinking about it more, it would be much easier just to have the drone programmed to circle the house, or float between a few points. You have a known flight path and the drones could get much better angles than static cameras attached to the house (looking in vs. out). You might want to launch at least 2 drones to get front/back coverage, but this seems vastly easier than trying to track and follow.
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Not flexible enough for other scenarios though, like following jewel thieves from the jewelry store at a mall to the Interstate ramp and beyond. A drone could even go out of range to follow and return to a GPS coordinate when it runs down, though the live tracking would not be much use there, the documentation would.
 
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