Development of an unmanned aerial vehicle for remote live streaming on web dashboard

Abstract

As the prominence of autonomous aerial vehicles continues to rise globally, the ability of surveillance carried out remotely is likely to become a key aspect. In large spaces, random security checks are performed by security guards and are quite inefficient since on-foot monitoring is extremely non-productive and slow. This paper proposes a remote surveillance solution integrated into an aerial vehicle that performs random inspections and streams the live video on a web dashboard which is a faster and more reliable solution. The paper presents how to design and implement an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with surveillance capabilities wherein the live stream will be remotely accessible on any device connected to the same network. The main purpose of this drone is to transmit live data/video to a web dashboard and hence run inferences to analyse the data. A custom-made drone is integrated with Raspberry Pi with a Universal Serial Bus (USB) camera. An attempt to stream drone video feeds on local devices has been made in this field. The proposed framework operates in the robot operating system (ROS) integrated with the gazebo simulator and is designed to enable the software to communicate with the hardware. Two primary methodologies are utilised; simulations and experimental. The expected outcome should satisfy the need to view the drone’s live video feed on a web dashboard for remote surveillance and computer vision application. At the resolution of 640 × 480, the latency in the live stream varied from 1 to 3 s with 10 frame rates per second. The analysis of the flight logs of the drone suggests that it meets the desired stability required for smooth video streaming. The total estimate calculated to implement this system is Rs. 70,000 including contingencies and spare parts required for experimentation. The proposed prototype appears to be a viable solution for security solutions required by multiple large space owners on the study's findings.