I have seen a few people mention Agisoft PhotoScan Pro on the on the various forums here. For those thinking about purchasing this excellent piece of stitching/photogrammetry software, now would be the time...Field of View has it on sale for $100 off until the end of October (so $3,399.00 USD). Here is the link for more information http://fieldofviewllc.com/agisoft-photoscan-pro

I am wondering if anybody has been able to do any sort of characterization of the attitude estimation accuracy of the APM 2.0. I asked on the Blog Post 'Great lecture on the Outback Challenge by APM developer Andrew Tridgell' what type of direct geo-referencing accuracy he was getting and he said "20m error at 100m altitude in our testing so far." If one were to assume all the error was from angular uncertainty in a single axis, this would suggest a number in the realm of 11 degrees of error. This is one case, and I know there are a lot of contributing factors for direct geo-referencing error but these are only numbers I could find so far. Does anybody else have insight on what one could expect? Are there any special calibration or alignment steps taken at the 3DR factory?

Hello all, I have been a member of this community and active in the UAS industry for some time. I am currently teaching a 2 credit sophomore level mechanical engineering design class at a 4 year university where the students typically make devices to compete in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) student competition. This year the competition is a relay race for vehicles with different energy sources. (http://www.asme.org/events/competitions/student-design-competition)

I am teaching the same class next semester, however the class/project will have a UAS twist to it. As much  as I would like to have each student team put together a fully autonomous APM based aircraft and fly it, it is simply not practical from a cost, liability, and course load/timeline perspective at the moment.

I think it would be practical to have the students use a cheap/simple RC quad control board (aka hobbking/kk quad control board) to design and construct a quadrotor to complete some sort of indoor mission. I was wondering if this creative community could help me think of a potential competition/task that falls within the following guidelines.

1. A significant component of the competition involves designing a novel mechanism to perform a task(s) such that it can be determined to what degree one team did better than another.

2. The task is relevant to actual missions quadrotors/small UAS would perform in the real world.

3. A person with minimal RC flying skills could complete the task.

I have some ideas but at this point I don't want to taint other's input. Thanks for any ideas/thoughts. I think this will be a great opportunity for students to get some exposure to the systems engineering that surrounds UAS and get them interested in this hobby/career path.

If anyone thought the FAA could not move any slower on producing rules for sUAS...they were wrong. The last publication goal date was 11/17/2011...now the new proposed publication date is 01/06/2012 according to the Department of Transportation's website.

http://regs.dot.gov/rulemakings/201108/report.htm#11

I have been a little mystified when or if the FAA is going to produce a set of sUAS rules, especially with some of the language in the looming FAA re-authorization bill. And when the FAA pushes its NPRM deadline back several times because of "Unanticipated issues requiring further analysis" it does not exactly instill confidence. Well today as an attendee of the UAS Summit in Grand Forks, ND, I had the chance to hear the current status from the horses mouth. Rick Prosek, the manager at the FAA's Unmanned Aircraft Program Office stated the following points.

-The FAA internal sUAS rule making team had reached "concurrence" just this last month (5/11)

-He anticipates publishing the NPRM in the fall of 2011

-The final rule will most likely be enacted mid 2013

Now I understand that this may not be a dramatic change from what has already been projected, but for me it was mildly re-assuring to hear the updated timeline from a real human being.