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AlbatrossV2 group

Posted by Bohdan Mushkevych on August 25, 2010 at 3:25am


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


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Comments

  • Hugo Vincent August 28, 2010 at 8:46am
    I've pushed my OpenGC master branch here: http://github.com/hugovincent/GlassCockpit
    If you get in touch I'd be happy to restore Linux support and integrate your changes. Let me know.
  • Admin
    Morli August 27, 2010 at 9:47am
    Good work guys, this is turning to be interesting. Looking forward to see more development and beta release.
  • Hugo Vincent August 26, 2010 at 5:36am
    Oh and also Mac OS X support including full screen (native, no FLTK or Plib), substantial performance improvements in the navigation database code through caching (roughly 100x faster for some operations including startup). Also I've started on vector-based layers in the navigation display (so you can load GIS shapefiles), and added my own much faster font renderer (rather than FTGL). In the process, I've broken the Linux/FLTK build and that would need fixing :-)
  • Hugo Vincent August 26, 2010 at 5:29am
    I think it would make more sense to merge the other way around. I did a lot more work on my OpenGC branch since you forked it, but have so far had it in a private repository. I've rewritten all the OpenGL code to support OpenGL ES (so it can work on mobile phones and iPads), vastly improved the navigation display (with Google Maps layers), and completed the work I started on XML-based layout. I could try to merge in your completed FlightGear datasource and G-meter, and republish my branch on GitHub. Thoughts?
  • Bohdan Mushkevych August 26, 2010 at 2:42am
    @photos: we have everything documented from skeleton to crashes :) I was thinking that after finishing with hardware-in-the-loop testing, i would provide post with technical details and photos.

    @OpenGC - an idea came to my mind about having one working copy of the OpenGC in the Internet. Would it make sense to use our version of the OpenGC as source-base and merge your changes in there? What have you focused on in recent development?

    Differences from original version:
    - configurable layout (via xml configuration file)
    - navigation display
    - two datasources for play: test datasource and FlightGear data source
    - object-oriented approach
    - g-meter
  • Admin
    Morli August 25, 2010 at 8:23pm
    Good work, feel free to ask, share and advice. Good luck with the project. Any photos of your airframe etc?
  • Hugo Vincent August 25, 2010 at 8:25am
    Hi there! You may be interested in my latest OpenGC branch. I haven't yet published it yet, but will try to get it up on GitHub soon.
    - Hugo Vincent, founder, Albatross Project :-)
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