He's an idea for consideration.
Wireless HD video systems for drone cameras exist but they are expensive $500-$2000, whereas you can buy hardware to do a standard definition video link over 1+km for $23 (
$9 5.8ghz composite video receiver and
$14 for the 600mW transmitter).
The cheap standard definition analog gear is totally uncompressed video over 5.8ghz. So the data link should be able to handle much better quality if the data had some compression with error checking and recovery.
So how about trying to design part of a system to do take HDMI video and compress/decompress it at ultra low latency.
It has to be ultra low latency because when you're flying a drone between trees at 70kph you just cant fly with lag.
Some features i think this system would need.
- Probably only frame compression, without temporal compression to keep latency ultra low.
- Compression doesn't need to be super high or complicated, just enough so it can be sent using cheap RF link hardware without any need for fancy Phase Shift Keying etc.
- Runs on cheap hardware/fpga
- Some sort of scaleable resolution decoding, So as you fly further away and the RF link has more errors you lose detail but still have enough to fly home. i.e. no hard wall for video reception where it just goes black.
This could be done using a side channel to return RSSI from receiver back to drone over the control link so it can reduce video data rate. Or it could be done automatically by the design of the video encoding system where data errors effect fine detail but not the overall picture. Ideally you'd want something similar to analog video, so as range increases the picture just gets grainy/B&W
The bonus would be that once you finish your PHD you can maybe make it into a product you can sell