Comment by rad man on January 28, 2008 at 5:51pm

that remindes me of this curious little tool (i wish i could insert a hyper link buy i guess your going to have to copy/paste) http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/rc/8698/

Comment by Howard Gordon on January 28, 2008 at 6:09pm

thinkgeek link - thinkgeek never updated their website when we changed from the ARM7 w/ Zigbee to the Blackfin w/WiFi, but that's basically the controller we're using

Comment by rad man on January 28, 2008 at 6:32pm

ahhh i see

3D Robotics Comment by Chris Anderson on January 30, 2008 at 7:59am

Howard,

Could you explain a bit more how this works. Do you actually fly the quadrotor with that Java app, like a RC transmitter? (If so, that sounds hard!). Or is the quadrotor autonomous, and you just "fly the camera" to points of interest, as with military UAVs, and let the aircraft fly itself?

Comment by Howard Gordon on January 30, 2008 at 9:13am

Yes - that's exactly what I'm doing - instead of remotely generating the servo control signals and relaying them via FM transmitter, the onboard Blackfin processor is generating the servo signals and receiving navigation commands from the Java app on the remote computer. It is somewhat challenging, though not impossible, to fly this way using the mouse and clicking on various controls (my son suggested adding a joystick or Wiimote to the computer for steering).

The purpose of the exercise is to figure out what control signals are required to achieve basic steering and stability. One of the goals is to identify a minimal sets of sensors required to achieve useful autonomous behaviors, completely taking the human operator out of the loop. From this starting point, I should be able to figure out how to program some basic behaviors, which ultimately can be coupled with sensor feedback (GPS, proximity, optical flow, altitude, visual landmarks, etc) to develop autonomous behaviors. This is a complex computational problem - we essentially need to distill and replicate the effect of a huge number of "calculations" performed by a human operator with an R/C transmitter when steering an aircraft on a complete mission, including takeoff and landing.

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