I am a member of the team tasked with continuing this project at RIT. We have made improvements in creating a more elegant transmission hardware system and have added some new, increased functionality to the drone. The aspect that is still holding us back from meeting our requirements is the software side of the project.
We have made minor improvements to the software and our performance is currently at 1920x960 resolution at 15fps. This is being bottlenecked because the software achieves a max bit rate of 22 Mbps. When the data reaches the computer from the receive antenna, the data is coming in at 120 Mbps (what is reported by the Ricoh). However, after it runs through the Ricoh_api the data rate drops down to 22 Mbps, which can only produce video quality at about 1920x960 at 15fps.
Things we have tried to fix this are to use the software on a computer with higher processing power, disabling the video rendering function, and using the software in chrome instead of Firefox. Unfortunately, none of these changes have resulted in improvements to the data rate.
Our theory is that the read function of the Ricoh api is what is taking the most time to execute and if we could speed that up, our video quality would increase. One thing we are trying right now is calling a C++ function in the javascript since this tends to operate faster (10x by our prototyping). We have yet to integrate this into the system though.
Is it possible to modify the Ricoh_api to boost the bit rate? Any suggestions outside of this scope are also welcome.
-Sam Murray
RIT MSD Amelia Team
(more info located here: https://wiki.rit.edu/display/P203190/Amelia+Drone)