Via Slashdot, here's a story with interesting videos about a group from Boston University.  There's a lot of interesting details about their build and in-the-field fixing.

The Brazilian Free-tailed bats above  (also called Tadarida) come together in the millions in caves all over Texas, leaving every night in swarms so big they can be detected by doppler radar. Somehow, they manage to fly through this dense self-clutter without major collisions, and so our goal is to better understand this behavior. For the AIRFOILS project, the IML team created the previously mentioned Batcopter. The goal was to fly a UAV through the dense clutter, and record the bats’ response with three ground-based high-speed FLIR cameras and an airborne 3D HD GoPro camera. The hope is to extract fundamental control laws of flying behavior in order to achieve better autonomous UAV flight.

 

 

 

• Hook a GPS to GCS.
• GCS calculates GPS difference.
• GCS transmits GPS correction over xbee MAVLINK connection
• ArduCopter Stabilize mode gets very fine resolution.

Details here: http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2011/05/idea-ardupilot-differential-gps.html

DGPS background: http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/CORS

I went to the first Bay Area FPV fly-in, met some people with really nice setups.  One person was using the iTelemetry app, from Immersion RC.  You can see he didn't quite make it back to the field (ran out of power), which could have been a pretty serious thing since we were flying in a hayfield and the plane was totally hidden in the grass.

He was able to take his iphone out to the field, and follow on google maps directly to the pin that was documenting the plane's location.  He also produced this nifty flight image, but I'm not sure if this was in the app or on his computer.

Does anyone know of a similar telemetry app in the APM world?

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?p=17926731&postcount=288

I attended the Bay Area meetup last weekend.  One interesting thing that Chris Anderson mentioned was his philosophy that it's often more important to make things that are easy to repair than it is to make things that can't break.

I almost immediately had an object lesson in this by crashing my quad.  Two props were broken, so I put it in the car to take care of later. When I got it home, I noticed that one of  the motor mounts was bent to an almost 45 degree angle.  Fixing it took less than a minute.  Thanks AeroQuad!

http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2011/04/repairing-aeroquad-motor-mount.html

Starting at about 2:46 in this NASA video, a rocket powered quad with payload!

Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity Rover) Mission Animation

So I was reading the article on the MIT guys using the kinect to map out a physical space and what struck me was not the amazing mapping technology, but their really great guard they've got on their quad props.

It looks like the straight edges are CF Rods... does anybody know about the light-colored round pieces that connect under the motor?  Any ideas on the best material/process to make some that are reasonably strong?

"The face you save could be your own."

Starting an APM build from scratch, everything seems to be working fine on a Mac running VMware.  Some notes here:

http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2011/03/ardupilot-mega-with-ardupirate-ng.html

http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2011/03/hooray-ardupilot-mega-20-beta-works.html

http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2011/03/hooray-ardupilot-mega-hooked-up-via.html

First bit of work: software setup.

Please take a look and let me know what you think!

http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot-mega/wiki/BeginnersSoftwareSetup

It can be hard to get started on building a quadcopter or drone.  As a beginner, it was difficult for me to figure out what was a good introductory project, what parts to buy, etc.  In order to smooth the process, I'm writing a guide that relieves the beginner of a lot of the uncertainty and decisions to be made.  The goal is to get someone who is relatively inexperienced flying, gaining experience, and able to make good decisions about further projects to pursue.

About me:

I'm working with a photographer named Josh Anon, who wants to do some aerial photograpy in the Arctic Circle.  I'm documenting that project here:

    http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/search/label/arcticopter

We've got at least 3 or 4 phases in the project, one of which is building an arducopter based model.  In addition, I'm an RC pilot and want to make an ardupilot fixed wing plane.  You can see lots-o-words about that at the eastbay-rc blog as well.

I was delighted to learn that there is an active East Bay group of flyers -- hardly surprising, since Chris is in the East Bay himself!  I've got an ardupilot on order, and will be working on both a quad and fixed wing.

So, I'm starting a beginner's guide.  It's basically my build log, with an emphasis on explaining to someone new what they need to do to follow along.

I've just typed and introduction, and as we start to put together the ardu-projects we'll add information there. Chris suggested to make it a google doc to facilitate collaboration.  So, here it is!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rp1XVCacq05-8pGO8yXlD21HAbcKRamyOfxWrK1JNlk/edit?hl=en#

I've learned a lot already from the excellent posts here and in the forums, and I'm sure I'll be asking lots of dumb questions as I go along.  You've been warned! :-)