Help with motion tracking

[waynefulcher]

I want to create something that will track motion around an area maybe 50' +/- in diameter. I invision having something like a 6 inch diameter by 2 foot long piece of plastic pipe standing/mounted on one end. The pipe would have some type of motion sensors all the way around it near the top. I could store the batteries and circut inside the pipe. Then I want to have a controller receiving feedback from the sensors so that it can control a servo to point a camera at the moving target. The camera would be attached to some type of rod coming out the top end of the pipe which is turned by the servo motor. This would be for outdoors. I do not need to worry about fast things such as a car riding by at 50 mph or a baseball being thrown. What I want to track would be someone walking by or pets or something like that. As phase two of the project I will want to be able to tell the camera to wake up and start recording or snap a photo depending on settings so I will need a controller that can handle that but for now I just want to see how quickly I could get the motion tracking portion working.
I have no idea what parts would be needed for this project, all I know is I need sensors, a controller, a servo motor but I don't know actual parts. I was hoping someone could give me a list of parts I could buy so I could quickly get this phase of the project up and running. I currently have a breadboard for testing and I have software/hardware for burning code into controller chips. I have a little experience using the Basic Stamp made by parallex and a few other small projects I have done. Thanks for any help and/or advice you can give.

Wayne

 

[Grossel]

Hi. It's easy to find ready made systems today that is doing this. Not moving a pipe, but make a camera point at a moving target.

However, this takes a lot of programming skills to get a position from a raw image.

A motion censor won't tell exact where and in what angle the moving object is located. It just detect that something is moving within a given range and within a given level at a given censor sensitivity.