Game Engine Driven, Real-Time Visualisation of Commercial UAV Operations with Varied Data Needs
Game engines are increasingly becoming the chosen platform for developing and driving applications outside of the games industry. For my honour's project; I chose to work with operational data from custom UAV (drones) to produce a real-time visualisation using Unreal Engine 4. Working with custom UAVs increased the challenge involved as the structure of the data received from the hardware may differ between individual UAVs, luckily I had the amazing support of Cloud3D (company site linked below) to help with understanding UAVs and always offering ideas about what would be useful in a visualisation.
Particular challenge to this was how to get data into UE4 - deciding to use a networked approach. Part of this including building a system which enabled the user to load in a file describing the data structure to be received, and using this to determine how to interpret the data. I also set up a series of Blueprint Functions which allowed received data items to be retrieved for use in the UE4 blueprint system which enables elements to be build without the requirement to understand C++.
My final solution was to receive UAV data via a python application as the protocols being considered already had accessible python support which helped speed the development process. Then using this python application as middleware prepare the data and send on as a UDP message to a specified socket and port which was bound to the visualisation application.
Some of the less academic things I learned :
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Soldering needs a really steady hand - and proper checks if you don't want a flight controller to start smoking while its in use in your hand
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UI design is harder than you'd think
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There is always an extra feature, know when to stop or risk breaking your project the night before submission
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Sometimes it doesn't matter how good the risk assessment was, at some point something will go wrong
Source Code
UAV Visualiation
Multiwii desktop repeater
Full Dissertation
The full dissertation for this project can be found below
Connect
This project would not have been possible without the help and support of Cloud3D.
They can be found at: