Posted by Assaf Weiss on January 18, 2010 at 6:08am
I am looking into it for a totally autonomuos plane.Here are some questions from a total newbie so please be paitient :-)My plan in the future is building the hardware itself from scratch. but for now I want to get a "hands on" experience with this board for a quick start. so for the questions:How far is the UAVDevboard from a fully autonomous autopilot?What is needed and is it possible to make it into one?what about pre fixed navagiation using a GPS?What about a future option for two way comnunication?etc.Thanks for your time.
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Assaf,
Welcome! The UAV Dev Board is completely open source, from the hardware and schematics right up to the latest firmware code. Most of it is hosted over on the Google Code site: http://code.google.com/p/gentlenav/. If you haven't yet, I'd start to check that out. If your are interested in working on the firmware, there is also a Google Group (details on the site above) which a lot of the developers and pilots of the 'bleeding edge' firmware participate in.
The current version of the UDB using the latest firmware (MatrixPilot 2.0) can safely fly most aircraft in one of four modes: manual, stabilized flight, navigating waypoints, and return to launch. I'm not sure what you're looking for in a fully autonomous autopilot, so I can't say how far that is from what you are looking for. There are features the team is still working on which might be considered needed, such as landing (there isn't any official firmware that will land... yet).
We have discussed adding two way communication, but again at this point that isn't in any of the firmware that I'm aware of. Depending on what you intend to do, it might be simple to add or it might require some work. Personally, I plan on adding two-way communication for setting waypoints, but it is currently fourth place on my list of projects for the UDB.
As for adding functionality and features, all that is needed is a good idea, some time, and a lot of testing. The development itself is mostly done in C (using Microchip's free MPLAB IDE and C30 compiler). There is also freely available documentation from Microchip on the processor.
Replies
Welcome! The UAV Dev Board is completely open source, from the hardware and schematics right up to the latest firmware code. Most of it is hosted over on the Google Code site: http://code.google.com/p/gentlenav/. If you haven't yet, I'd start to check that out. If your are interested in working on the firmware, there is also a Google Group (details on the site above) which a lot of the developers and pilots of the 'bleeding edge' firmware participate in.
The current version of the UDB using the latest firmware (MatrixPilot 2.0) can safely fly most aircraft in one of four modes: manual, stabilized flight, navigating waypoints, and return to launch. I'm not sure what you're looking for in a fully autonomous autopilot, so I can't say how far that is from what you are looking for. There are features the team is still working on which might be considered needed, such as landing (there isn't any official firmware that will land... yet).
We have discussed adding two way communication, but again at this point that isn't in any of the firmware that I'm aware of. Depending on what you intend to do, it might be simple to add or it might require some work. Personally, I plan on adding two-way communication for setting waypoints, but it is currently fourth place on my list of projects for the UDB.
As for adding functionality and features, all that is needed is a good idea, some time, and a lot of testing. The development itself is mostly done in C (using Microchip's free MPLAB IDE and C30 compiler). There is also freely available documentation from Microchip on the processor.
Hope this helps,
Adam Barrow
Anyway, all of these are answered on the project's site, but the short form is this:
--It's already a fully autonomous autopilot, doing pre-fixed navigation with GPS
--The hardware does not support 2-way communications.