This video shows some recent flight test results from my PhD research on autonomous UAV docking, that was conducted with the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) at The University of Sydney. To the best of our knowledge, these experiments are the first time two UAVs have docked in mid-air.
Some of my other videos provide more specifics on the hardware/software, but I'm using my own autopilot, a Beaglebone Black as the formation flight computer and an Odroid U3 to do the onboard vision processing. All the guidance, navigation and control algorithms on all the hardware is developed in Simulink and automatically converted to C/C++.
The IR vision aspect is probably of interest to some of the guys doing auto-landing with IR beacons. We use a C920 with narrow bandpass filter and 940nm LED markers without modulation. It works in all lighting conditions except when looking directly at the sun where the high number of false positives are difficult to distinguish from the actual markers, but there are a number of ways to handle this infrequent situation.
There are some nice airborne shots so watch in HD!
Comments
Amazing work. Love how well it works. To refuel at hight altitude in relative calm air a global hawk is one thing, but doing it in low altitude with a small UAV is a completely different challenge. Especially since you use a simple modified web-cam.
I am using as some other people too a very similar technology to land a VTOL UAV on a ship. It is great to see that it works with a simple web-cam, that gives me some confidence with my project.
Would be great to combine your technology with a big mother-ship to deploy, refuel/recharge and recover UAVs (maybe even VTOL UAVs). So you could have a swarm of UAVs with long endurance and long distance capabilities
http://arminstrobel.com/2015/02/08/concept-study-airborne-launch-an...
Amazing work. This would be awsome for the new outback challenge.
Very impressive result. Great job!
It has been done two global hawks had refueled off eacho ther here in america- done by nasa I believe
Very impressive indeed! Congratulations!
Impressive!
Amazing. The bit about coding everything in simulink is a bit mind blowing as well.
really great work!
* in conjunction
Expanding on the idea of using this for a net recovery: I wonder if this could be done using the new Pixhawk 2 in conjustion with the new higher-level controller?
Dan, would you consider making the code, or your clearly considerable talent, available to the community?
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