Its been a while so lets try again. Had a hangout with Chris and we briefly spoke about the next T3 round. Chris will work on a top prize ;-)
The mission is simple, get airborne climb to 20m
Fly a cube with 50m sides, pausing for one minute at each corner, so your flight time cannot be anything less than 8 minutes..... Bonus points if you can stay longer at each corner....
The neatest cube KML wins.
If you can do this with a 3D aircraft I feel you would have a very strong chance of winning!
I will close the competition on April the 14th. I will be looking at where you are flying very closely. Please don't try this in public places or within 500m of any building / road.
Comments
why would we want drones to go mainstream, i think many will agree if that happens then regulation is going to come down like a hammer
the px4 is ridiculously expensive to match the same functionality as the APM 2.5 what gives?
Congrats to the winners! that was a good event and useful for me in terms of setting a specific goal to help improve performance. I hope we do more of them....of course not before Sparkfun AVC.
Sorry for the delay, my fault posted the results here http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/t3-qube-results?xg_source=a... basically its like this
1 Steve Westerfield, AutoQuad, longest loiter in each corner 42 minutes between 3 and 5 minutes at the corners
2 Aerhead, AutoQuad, a really great looking cube
3 Richard Boyhan APM, for trying so hard.
Choosing winners seems not enough. I appreciate the hours of thinking before flight planning that everybody has put into this.
Well done all.
Hi All,
It is now 4 days since this neato contest ended. Who won?;)
Cheers,
Jim
FUn following this and trying the one (kind of badly) time. Got me pretty interested in the AQ stuff as well. One thing that I have been unable to find is any sort of real guide to using the Mission Planning part of Mission Planner. MOst of it seem self-evident, but there are obvious gotchas - like how to change altitude in place, how the jump logic works, etc... that I have not seen well covered.
Bill, I agree with both of your statements.
Given the impressive showing on all sides in this round, it will be interesting to see what Gary comes up with next. It's going to have to be challenging!
Ok all, I am bringing the hammer down and will converse with Chris and we will choose the top three.
This has been a great contest, proving that friendly competition can push things forward and focus the mind. Well done to everyone!
As I said earlier the data shown in the KML are raw LAT/LON coordinates recoded from the UBlox module. We seem to getting back to the outside observer requirement rather quickly :)
I think that you will soon find out that there is more to integrating a GPS module into a system than connection its serial lines to the MCU. Hardware design considerations including antenna selection, ground plane, signal routing and EMI defense are essential if you are going to get the best possible performance from your GPS module, especially in a noisy environment such as ours.
Randy, that is looking very good! Do you know what is with the kinks in the two horizontal legs? Did the quad really do that or is it just data?
Bill, is there any smoothing of the GPS data before you log it, either in the GPS itself of your code? I just ask because those lines are so *smooth*. If you look at Randy's latest entry, his lines are quite straight, but they are not smooth. There's a fair bit of low-amplitude, high-frequency "noise", especially on the vertical legs. I don't really think his quad moved like this, I daresay it's impossible. I believe this to be translational noise in the GPS signal as the quad essentially held position but travelled vertically.
This is to be expected I think, as you can see noise in the position estimate if the GPS is parked on the ground. When moving horizontally, the GPS typically does some smoothing. Maybe you've got different settings or something? Just making sure we're comparing apples to apples.
At the end of the day, BOTH groups should be extremely proud of the fact that we're at the point we're sitting here nitpicking details of exactly how the data was collected. When the flight profiles are so good that we question our ability to measure the accuracy of them, that's simply amazing. Compare this to just 1 year ago where we had NO entries in these competitions, and now several of us are duking it out!
Talking to the guys running the SparkFun competition, they questioned whether we could actually fly a copter through a 20x20 meter box (the wicket) based solely on GPS coordinates. I think it's entirely possible, actually quite easy. They figured you'd need a vision system to do it.
As stated, I initially thought the AQ entry was faked, but I don't think that's true anymore. Just reading the AQ thread, you can see that this really happened. If not, it would be an elaborate hoax that doesn't in any way justify the prize.
Gary:
I'm still planning on trying to run the mission with a heli, but it wouldn't be an official entry. I'll probably do a separate blog post about it. It's mostly just to demonstrate the capability of the system on a heli. Final nail in the coffin of the DJI Ace One. ;)
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