UAS Search and Rescue Demo (Simulation)
Simulators can be powerful tools for developing and testing UAS flight control systems as well as prototyping new ideas. Here is an interactive FlightGear based demonstration showing:
- Auto-launch from a carrier.
- Circle holds.
- Route following.
- Gyro stabilized camera.
- Simulated search and rescue mission
- Auto-approach and landing on a carrier (factoring in winds and even carrier motion.)
To get started, go to the following link and read through the installation and operating instructions: http://www.flightgear.org/uas-demo/
The flight computer flies everything from start to finish. Your job as UAS operator is to give mission commands and operate the gyro camera (and enjoy some of the other views as well.)
This demonstration can be flown with the FlightGear multiplayer system enabled so you might see other UAV's or aircraft in the airspace. I enjoy enabling live METAR weather and flying at different times of day and turning on moderate turbulence to give the flight control system an extra workout. In low visibility the search and rescue portion of the mission can be very difficult if not impossible. Sometimes you get lucky, some times you don't.
Just to take a step back here. The point of this demonstration is to show:
- The power and realism available in flight simulators.
- The ability to script complex flight control logic using FlightGear's built in scripting system.
- This entire demo is created with a stock version of FlightGear. You don't need external hardware, you don't have to fiddle with complicated communication protocols, you can do everything inside of FlightGear first -- on a single PC.
- Auto-landing tasks can be very complicated if you wish to factor in wind and fly a stable and optimal approach. Adding multiple entities in a multiplayer simulation can expose the need to design an approach that ensures traffic separation. Flying the logic over and over in simulation under a variety of conditions helps you spot situations you might not have otherwise accounted for and improve and refine the code in ways that would be much more difficult to do in real life.
- All of the flight control in this demonstration is done without "cheating". By this I mean all the sensor inputs to the flight controller are the same sorts of inputs a small embedded autopilot could have. The autopilot only manipulates the control actuators. After that we let the flight dynamics do whatever they are going to do. We sense, we actuate, just like in real life.
I'm calling this demo a "BETA" so I'm interested in feedback ... especially feedback on the instructions at the webpage link.
Be very careful though; you might end up having fun and wasting a lot of time with this. I know I have! :-)
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Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on September 25, 2011 at 3:36pm -
Crikey
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Comment by Michael Zaffuto on September 25, 2011 at 6:59pm -
I second the Crikey!
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Comment by Curt Olson on September 25, 2011 at 7:02pm -
I mostly speak American, is that a good or bad Crikey? Perhaps this is the time of the night where only the Aussies are online? :-)
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Comment by Michael Zaffuto on September 25, 2011 at 7:14pm
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That's a good Crikey as in wow amazing much much respect for your talent, I've got just the pefect workstation to try it on, will provide feedback on your installation instructions. Thanks!
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Developer Comment by Mark Colwell on September 26, 2011 at 3:16am -
Curt you have been busy, Wow
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Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on September 26, 2011 at 5:21am -
Yes a positive crikey, great work.
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Comment by Dale on September 26, 2011 at 6:17am -
That's really neat! Thanks!
I did get fg 2.4 installed and working on 64bit ubuntu 11.04. Just follow the instructions That did take a while, but not a waste of time. These pages helped:
http://www.flightgear.org/download/source-code/
http://www.andrewferrier.com/blog/2011/08/17/compiling-flightgear-2...
And! The uas demo runs. It took off and flew. Really cool. It returned to base, but porpoised severely on final and a little bit on downwind, and overflew the carrier into the water.
So, is there a set of instructions for Flightgear HIL with APM, on Linux? I see the FGshim in the APM tools. Can I use just that for HIL, and not the mission planner as part of HIL?
In the past, I tried some using MissionPlanner as the interface between APM and Flightgear, but I didn't compile MissionPlanner on linux, and the precompiled version run with mono seemed to crash. Here's where we were talking about it before: http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/ardupilotmega-flightgear
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Comment by Curt Olson on September 26, 2011 at 7:50am
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Hi Dale,
Thanks for the positive report! One thing I've noticed is that the F-14b SAS can start to go wild if your frame rates are consistently below 20 -- so that's something to watch for.
I've been fiddling with adding a camera mounted in the deck looking up the approach path. I'm not a navy guy but I googled and I think this is called a "plat" camera? The idea is that if the aircraft is on the perfect approach, it should be dead center of the video image, so it's a nice way to gauge the quality of the approach and see all the micro-corrections the autopilot is making. It's kind of neat to watch if you are paying attention to the subtle details of the approach, but probably pretty boring otherwise. :-)
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Comment by dusl on October 7, 2011 at 7:13pm -
good
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