First of all, let me express special gratitude to:
- Curtis Olson for his friendly support and technical advices
- Hugo Vincent & John Stowers for Albatross-UAV project and making it available on Internet

More than 2 years ago, together with friend, we started work on UAV project. Having no RC/Aviation background, it took us at least a year to catch with terminology and RC basics. Our first plane took 6 month from making an order to mounting an engine. And now, as we are getting ready for hardware-in-the-loop testing, I would like to share with you our progress and project details.

Team. Currently there are 5 of us, with dedicated pilot (homegrown, and
please don’t ask how much it cost) and hardware engineer. Rest are
math/IT alumni.

Projectware.
Software:Groundstation and Protocol are founded on Albatross-UAV project. Groundstation comprise of Control Panel, Route Window and refactored OpenGC as HUD.
Hardware:Having hardware engineer involved only early this year, we have been focused earlier on components that required limited hardware skills: Gumstix Verdex XL6P, Gumstix GPSstix, Aerocomm AC4486-5M antennas, Sparkfun IMU - 9 Degrees of Freedom, AttoPilot XYZ Horizon Sensor, and Olimax ARM.

Current achievements.
Groundstation is almost done. User is able to:
-Setup Route. Each waypoint holds command field in addition to lat-lon-alt. It will be executed once UAV reaches the waypoint. An example of commands are make a photo, open parachute, etc.
- Request manual/autopilot mode
- Track current technical state and send manual commands to UAV
- See current avionics data (speed, altitude, accelerations, etc) on OpenGC

Onboard: in progress.
-IMU. Work is being done on gathering IMU data and transforming it to Albatross protocol format. Later, multiplexor will be developed to handle input from all available sensors to Olimax ARM board.
-Current Autopilot is more stub, than real reflex-aware daemon. Large portion of work needs to be done there, but it is on its way.

Overall:we are getting ready for the Hardware-in-the-Loop testing. With current progress we should achieve this point in 2-3 months and afterwards - start preparing for autopilot mode.

Links:
Project homepage: http://gitorious.org/albatross
Blog (ukrainian): http://shershen.blogspot.com/search/label/UAV