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High Altitude Glider

Posted by Cuddy on January 7, 2012 at 6:44am

Hi all, 

This is my 1st post here so please bear with me if I'm posting in the wrong board etc!

I'm heavily involved in High Altitude Ballooning which is sending payloads up into near space using a weather balloon with various tech equipment on. A project that I'm exploring currently is the possibility of an autonomous glider that will fly the payload back to a predesignated location once the balloon has burst - for easy retrieval.

I am aware of similar projects and have looked at the posts on this forum and others. I'm currently working with a great guy over at flyingwings.co.uk who is custom building me a flying wing that will be able to house all the payload equipment etc. This is in addition to a glider that I'm building myself out of styrofoam. 

For stabilisation/autopilot I'm looking to use ArduPilot. I have a couple of questions though:

Will the pilot work with a flying wing? 

Will the pilot work with any old plane (that I'm making!) i.e. not inherently stable?

Currently I have a lassen iQ gps module that I use, will this integrate easily with ArduPilot?

Finally (phew) - if I was to go with a separate stabilisation unit so the glider/flying wing fly stable, would that eliminate the need for the IMU 'oil pan' expansion board? As all I would require is a 'return to home' feature.

Sorry about all the questions, I'm very new to aeronautics stuff.

Thanks!

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Tags: altitude, glider, high
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Replies

  • Daniel Nugent January 16, 2012 at 9:17am

    I had the same idea 6 months ago and now im trying to figure out the bugs. I was going to use ardupilot but i figured out one problem. you would know that air density at those altitudes is extremely low. making surface control hard. it can be overcome but you would need to tweek the code. i was going to do that but then decided to make my own code. Because im not sure how ardupilot works with no motor and if it alllows you to control speed with gravity/dives. problems i encountered when i started to design. check out my forum on a similar glider!

    http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/m_10910937/anchors_10911552/mpage_1...

  • Distributor
    Martint BuildYourOwnDrone.co.uk January 7, 2012 at 7:49am

    Hi Cuddy,

     

    Now that's a list :)

     

    The Ardupilot will work with the flying wings.

     

    The Ardupilot will work with just about every airframe, there is tuning needed to match with each airframe, it will not work miracales but if you could fly it the AP should be able too.

     

    I would say stick with the stock GPS unless you have the skills needed to put the other in play, it works very well and is not costly.

     

    I would say to stay with the setup which works, RTL is a feature and is a working set up, dependeing on the time frames there are two ArduPilot mega's out at the moment, one easy to get and the new one (2.5) which will take you a good 4-8 weeks.

     

    Regards

     

    Martin

    www.buildyourowndrone.co.uk

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