A Methodology for Measuring Flight Speed of Drones in Indoor Environments

Abstract Drones have become widespread in a wide range of fields. To calculate the energy model of drone, it is important to measure the flight speed automatically and accurately. However, acceleration-sensor-based or GPS-based flight speed measurement doesn’t give an accurate result. To solve this problem, an image-processing-based flight speed measurement method is proposed in this paper. Four cameras are employed to capture the images of the drone and an algorithm is proposed to synchronize these four cameras to get a higher accuracy. Experiments are conducted indoors so that it can be measured without the effect of wind. We compare the results of the purposed algorithm and human observations. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm measures the flight speed correctly.