Revisiting Marconi Kites

Abstract

In the current century, internet and communication is as important for human beings as is oxygen for survival. The modern world is entirely dependent on internet for all its personal and professional dealings. Keeping n view its importance, the facility is widespread. But there are still certain parts of the world where this facility has not yet reached, and so are the other forms of communication.The reason for unavailability of all forms of communication in those areas is because the areas are hard to reach or are remote. In this regard, there has been a lot of work being carried out to access such areas. We have proposed one such technique to provide communication access to those parts of the world, and this technique is equally ective to be used during the period o turmoil, when no other form of communication is eective. We have proposed kite mounted antennas to be used as aerials for successful communication. Kites provide a simple, cost e ective solution since it has no fuel requirements and can be set up anywhere and everywhere. We have proposed to use a simple camera to track the kite movement to ensure proper beamforming and to steer the beam in the required direction. The whole setup is simple and is based on simple numerical calculations as well. We have mainly focused on the vision part of this experiment, where we have employed simple concepts of machine learning and computer vision to accurately estimate the kite position and orientation. From our experiments, we have found that kite position can be easily estimated using simple techniques of computer vision on images. Real-time estimation is also possible using the same techniques but with the use of some special markers that are easily available and can be easily used with kites. We have also concluded that these kites can used in the form of arrays as well to cover larger areas and form a proper network just like the current networking procedures. However, we have not performed any such experiments for now as it is out of scope for this research.