This week, some of the 3D Robotics engineers and I visited Scaled Composites in Mojave, about an hour and half east of Los Angeles, to demo ArduCopter, get a tour of the facilities and talk about the DIY Drones community-driven innovation model with the Scaled engineers. Scaled is famous for being founded by the legendary Burt Rutan (who retired this year), winning the X-Prize for the first civilian mission to space, and for designing SpaceShip Two and its launch aircraft WhiteKnight Two (both shown above), which will be the aircraft used by Virgin Galactic to start the first regularly scheduled space tourism business in a few years. It is total geek nirvana and the closest thing to the Right Stuff still in operation.
We weren't allowed to take pictures for most of our tour and meetings (we got to see EVERYTHING, including watching the Virgin Galactic pilots train on the awesome room-sized Spaceship Two simulator and poking our heads into Spaceship Two and Whiteknight Two), but here are a few shots we could take:
When you approach the Scaled facilities, the first thing you see is the Rotary Rocket, which it made about a decade ago and flew once before funding issues killed the project.
Here it is up close. Hard to imagine that two pilots sat in that cockpit while it flew. Brave...
Gigio Romero (UDrones), Sam Kelly and Jeff Taylor from the 3D Robotics team.
Back in the 1990s, Scaled designed one of their first UAVs, the Raptor. They're mostly a manned aircraft company, so they made it "manned optional". That meant having the pilot sit outside! Below is a photo of that seat in storage today. Note the stirrups--they had to tie the pilot's feet to the fuselage so the wind didn't blow them out of the straps!
This was a crazy design by one engineer back in the day trying to prove that you didn't need high aspect-ratio wings (long thin ones, like a glider) for efficient flight. He survived, but his theory didn't.
This is a personal project underway by one of the engineers. It's an electric airplane that is designed to set distance and endurance records for manned electric flight. It uses a brushed electric motor (we weren't allowed to photograph it, but it was no larger than a dinner plate) that only generates 20 horsepower. But this design is so efficient, that's enough. BTW, they use a brushed rather than brushless motor because its failure mode is more gentle. As we all know, if something goes wrong with one of the brushless motor wires or the ESC, it's game over--it can destroy itself in seconds. There are fewer things that can wrong with a brushed motor.
I gave a speech about DIY Drones and open innovation models to some of the engineers. Then Gigio did an indoor demo of ArduCopter.
Not a lot of room to fly in there...don't hit the cruise missile!
Then it was time for an outdoors demo. The wind was blowing at 28 knots (32 miles per hour)!!! Here, Jeff is setting up the ground station.
ArduCopter handled the wind pretty well! But eventually when we put it Loiter mode at higher altitude a crazy gust blew it out of the flight area and Gigio had to take over manual control. Unfortunately it was too far away to see the orientation (sadly he wasn't flying in Simple Mode, which would have made that unnecessary), so he had to put it down in a neighboring field. Copter retrieved, safe and sound!
Comments
Wow Thats really cool Chris. The Scaled Composites folks are a Great add-on to the DIY-Drones team. The future is looking bright.
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_listCategoriesAndProduc...
It was a real privilege to get into the hangars at Scaled Composites. I was impressed with the dedication (@Jack) all the engineers had to flying. They were certainly not living in mobile homes, though :)
Several employees we spoke to were also working on their own kit planes outside work that they predicted would take 5000 man hours to complete! I wish I could say I had that kind of patience but I prefer the instant feedback of the compile button on Arduino!
Holy testosterone. These guys must be totally committed to flying. They live in the middle of the desert, spend a lifetime only around men, in mobile homes, with dusty, unfinished electric airplanes as their only possessions. Makes you wonder if you've got that level of dedication or if your flying can only just be a hobby.
Thank you for the very extensive reply! I am a huge fan of Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites, I follow their work as much as I can. They use some very interesting avionics like the SS1 cockpit instruments that If I am correct they have develop in-house and can be traced back to the asymmetric Boomerang aircraft :
And a bonus video, a scaled (:P) model of SpaceShipTwo made from Depron, flown nearby Scaled's hangar in Mojave. The video was upload some weeks before the first flight of the actual SS2:
What IKE said.
IKE, they invited us because they saw some real cultural similarities. They all come from the homebuilt aircraft community (Rutan and Scaled got their start making kit planes), and still have strong roots in the amateur world. By night, they make cool hobby airplanes (including a lot of RC stuff) in their garages/personal hangers, and by day they use the same techniques to send people to space.
That said, the homebuilt aircraft world does not have the same traditions of open source, web communities and sharing, the way we do. Indeed, it's often very competitive and secretive, in part because many of these homebuilt planes are racers designed for pylon competition. So they were very interested in that aspect of our community.
One natural application of our model is in manned aircraft avionics. A dashboard display that provides attitude data that is no more sophisticated (actually quite a bit less) than APM costs several thousand dollars, in part because it is proprietary. The display looks just like the Mission Planner GCS. How much cheaper and better would it be if it were open source?
Note that the FAA does not require certification for avionics used in this experimental aviation category, and the devices are not controlling the plane, just providing data for the pilot. So it is not impossible to imagine that someone could take APM, add a screen and make a quite good low-cost avionics package for this market.
As for ArduCopter, they were impressed (I think "inspiring" was the most common word heard). Most of them come from the fixed wing world, and I don't think they realized that this level of autonomy was possible in multicopters at this price. I suspect we'll see some of them in this community soon, if they aren't already.
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