Hi,
I'm actually being paid to lift an rc plane as high as I can using a balloon and then release the plane to fly home on it's own.
I have my Permission for Aerial Work and an exemption from the UK CAA for this adventure, plus insurance, so the legal side is sorted.
I am a professional aerial cameraman with a few years multicopter experience for my day job and FPV racing. I used to fly fixed wing rc for fun without autopilot but now do large land surveying using fixed wings.
I have built the prototype plane using a Skywalker X5 and Pixhawk. The delta shape was chosen because it has very few sticky-out bits for the balloon lines to get caught on. The X5 was chosen because I can replace the frame relativity cheaply after "teaching" it it auto-land. It also has a big payload area.
Obviously I've not done this before so I'm hoping that people here will be able to help out. Here's a few questions to start with:
Recovery from stall: Once the plane has been released from the balloon lines, it will fall for a few seconds before trying to recover horizontal flight. I'm not going to try for a long range rc control so the pixhawk will have to fly it home. What is the best flight mode to have it recover? I'm more interested in what mode to use in testing since I will fly up to 100m or so and then force a stall before allowing the pixhawk to recover for me.
The full size plane will probably be either an X8 or a Buffalo, anyone have a better airframe which is easily available in the UK?
I've already sent up a balloon to test the pixhawk, cameras and batteries. I was going to use a Raspberry Pi and Pixhawk to run the mission and make decisions when to move the release mechanism servo, etc but the Pixhawk 2.1 with Edison module looks a neater solution with less things to go wrong. I'd prefer the more tried and tested original pixhawk but I'm happy to give it a good bashing and go back to the pi if the Edison is not up to scratch.
Any other helpful comments or ideas would be most welcome.
I'd like to get this right because it's going to be landing live on TV. :-/
Thanks, Tim
Replies
oh boy... no experiance at all? get some real help.
-first of all, your "consumer" gps will not work in that height.
- almost no air, nice to you your control surfaces there.
-what will you do about the temperatures (battery -> cold -> stops working. electronics -> no air -> will get extermly hot)
-you want to use servos ? ah ok, how hard will the grease be in -50° ?
and that are only the problems that come in my mind in the fist 20 seconds. there are a lot more. it can be done. but in ONE try with no experiance? not gonna happen.
so why do you need help than?
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