Track Horse Movement

General project help for Adafruit customers

Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

Please be positive and constructive with your questions and comments.
Locked
User avatar
miax
 
Posts: 157
Joined: Tue Apr 05, 2011 11:41 am

Track Horse Movement

Post by miax »

I have a need to track a horse that is riding around an arena that is at least 100 feet wide and 150 feet long. My goal is to build a project using Adafruit parts that will track and focus a camera on a horse and rider as they ride around the ring. :) The challenge I have is that the ring will have other riders/horses in it (at the ends, waiting for their turn) and that the arena is larger than most of the proximity sensors can detect movement on.

One idea I'm exploring is using IR sensors around the edges of the ring, and an Adafruit IR remote control mounted behind the rider on the horse with an array of IR LEDs that boost amplify/multiply the output of the remote so that the sensors will pick the signal up as the horse passes within, say, 50 feet. The IR sensors indicate that they can sense far-enough, I would just have to figure out how to take the output of the IR LED from the remote control and multiplex or amplify that across a few dozen IR LEDs so that all directions are covered.

Would this work? :)

Thanks!!

Kris

User avatar
adafruit_support_bill
 
Posts: 88087
Joined: Sat Feb 07, 2009 10:11 am

Re: Track Horse Movement

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

What kind of accuracy do you need? I would think that GPS would give you better accuracy than IR. Not to mention that IR is difficult outdoors.

You might also want to look at the CMUcam. It does color 'blob' tracking and has direct servo outputs to drive a pan/tilt turret.

User avatar
miax
 
Posts: 157
Joined: Tue Apr 05, 2011 11:41 am

Re: Track Horse Movement

Post by miax »

Hmmmm your probably right - how quickly can I get updates from the GPS? I could try implementing that if the tracking is quick.

Thanks for the response!!

Kris

User avatar
adafruit_support_bill
 
Posts: 88087
Joined: Sat Feb 07, 2009 10:11 am

Re: Track Horse Movement

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

how quickly can I get updates from the GPS?
The Ultimate GPS does 10Hz updates.

User avatar
miax
 
Posts: 157
Joined: Tue Apr 05, 2011 11:41 am

Re: Track Horse Movement

Post by miax »

I'm going to give it a try!

Thank you. :)

Cheers!

Kris

User avatar
lyndon
 
Posts: 281
Joined: Tue Mar 29, 2011 5:28 pm

Re: Track Horse Movement

Post by lyndon »

GPS that will provide the accuracy you need will have to be Differential GPS. Is it an indoor or outdoor arena? If it's indoor, it's most likely a steel building and good luck getting good GPS signals.

I assume you will mount this on the rider, since expensive electronics and horses are, shall we say, not the best idea :-) Is the rider going to be wearing a helmet? If so, I'd suggest that the helmet have a distinct color or reflector and then use machine vision to track the rider. Or you could attach a small IR LED to the rider and have the camera track that. I don't have links handy, but there are a number of OSS webcam vision systems available.

That's the theory to make what you asked for work. In practice, however, what I would do is set up 4 cheap cameras around the periphery of the arena and have them running all the time and then edit the recording as needed. This is likely to be much easier, and cheaper in the end. Since you normally don't spend much time in the middle of the arena, at any given time, one of the cameras would have a good view of the subject.

User avatar
dr. au-fait
 
Posts: 73
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2011 6:17 pm

Re: Track Horse Movement

Post by dr. au-fait »

This is probably what you're looking for. It's designed specifically to track objects based on color using servos or other drive mechanisms. Like Lyndon said, put a colored helmet on the rider for tracking.
CMU Cam

User avatar
miax
 
Posts: 157
Joined: Tue Apr 05, 2011 11:41 am

Re: Track Horse Movement

Post by miax »

Thank you both for the reply and the link!

I'll check those out and will post back with my findings as the project progresses. I'm going to try the GPS, IR Leds and some other ideas.

Tracking a colored helmet or colored object is a great idea!

Cheers :)

Kris

Locked
Please be positive and constructive with your questions and comments.

Return to “General Project help”