Color-based tracking in Drone Programming - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Color-based tracking

📖 Scenario: You are programming a drone to follow a red ball in a room. The drone uses a camera to see colors and moves to keep the red ball centered in its view.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple program that detects the red color in the camera feed and decides the drone's movement direction to follow the red ball.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called camera_feed with pixel colors as keys and their counts as values

Create a variable called red_threshold to decide when red is dominant

Use a for loop with variables color and count to iterate over camera_feed.items()

Create a variable called red_count to sum counts of red pixels

Print the drone's movement direction based on red detection

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Drones use color tracking to follow objects like balls or markers in sports, delivery, or search and rescue.

💼 Career

Understanding color-based tracking helps in robotics, drone programming, and computer vision jobs.

1

DATA SETUP: Create the camera feed data

Create a dictionary called camera_feed with these exact entries: 'red': 15, 'green': 5, 'blue': 10, 'yellow': 3

Drone Programming

# Create the camera_feed dictionary with exact color counts
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary with the exact colors and counts.

2

CONFIGURATION: Set the red detection threshold

Create a variable called red_threshold and set it to 10

Drone Programming

camera_feed = {'red': 15, 'green': 5, 'blue': 10, 'yellow': 3}
# Set red_threshold to 10
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 10 to the variable red_threshold.

3

CORE LOGIC: Count red pixels in the camera feed

Create a variable called red_count and set it to 0. Then use a for loop with variables color and count to iterate over camera_feed.items(). Inside the loop, add count to red_count only if color is equal to 'red'.

Drone Programming

camera_feed = {'red': 15, 'green': 5, 'blue': 10, 'yellow': 3}
red_threshold = 10
# Initialize red_count to 0
# Use a for loop to add counts of 'red' pixels to red_count
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an if statement inside the loop to check if color is 'red' and add count to red_count.

4

OUTPUT: Print the drone's movement direction

Write a print statement that prints "Move forward" if red_count is greater than red_threshold. Otherwise, print "Search for red ball".

Drone Programming

camera_feed = {'red': 15, 'green': 5, 'blue': 10, 'yellow': 3}
red_threshold = 10
red_count = 0
for color, count in camera_feed.items():
    if color == 'red':
        red_count += count
# Print "Move forward" if red_count > red_threshold else print "Search for red ball"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an if-else statement to decide what to print based on red_count and red_threshold.