Andrew Tridgell ("Tridge") is a well-known programmer in the open source world (Samba, etc) and one of the leaders of the APM dev team. His UAV team, CanberraUAV, will be competing in this year's Outback Challenge with an APM-powered Telemaster, and at the Australian Linux conference he gave a spectacular lecture about the team's strategy and the technological challenges in the competition.
This is a must watch for anyone interested in more advanced UAV functions. Tridge and his team have added a Panda board to APM to do image processing. This is a great opportunity to watch a world-class technologist explain the strategy they're using to try to win this competition.
Comments
You're right, my mistake sorry.
As a fellow CanberraUAV member I can answer a few of these questions (for myself, not for Tridge):
@Brian Adrian
It's a competition, competitions are for winning... I don't understand your question ;-)
Yes it is ambitious but then we are a determined and organised team. Minimum completion requirements are ambitious too, especially for a small team with just a couple of people (we are big enough that people get to specialise).
@UAVOZ
tuning is just a minor detail. If we had crashed/broken The Big Plane that many times we would have run out of time and money already. We try to find simple tests for each concept, then keep validating and improving the sucessfull elements as they are integrated into increasingly sophistocated combinations.
If we tried to work out all the details up front using theory, we would still be debugging on the bench and not flying. That would not be as much fun. We have many flights already, and learned many lessons from them, but have only flown The Big Plane a few times, and even then only with conventional RC (autopilots as passengers).
@Chris Anderson
A minor correction - the telemaster is probably not our competition airframe (possible fallback though, I suppose). It's just a very handy test workhorse because it's big enough to carry the long range radio gear and vision stuff at the same time (just). We still haven't validated the datalink or vision system next to the thumping great petrol motor! safe to assume that will throw up some issues, like everything we'll find them and fix them one step at a time (even if we have to sacrifice a washing machine).
@Squalish, we did consider using high-angle photos, but decided that our current strategy of covering the whole area from 100m was simpler and much easier to implement with fast computer vision algorithms.
The altitude code in APM already combines the barometer with the GPS home location, with the barometer calibrated at startup. For the sorts of altitudes we fly at the local gradient corrections would be very small I think. Mixing GPS in during flight is problematic as GPS altitude varies so much - it is quite common in a 15 minute flight for the GPS to say that the airstrip is 30m higher on landing than it was on takeoff, whereas we tend to get barometer based altitude within a few meters.
@Brian, only one team flies at a time. Each team gets 1 hour plus some prep time. The competitions runs over multiple days. It is also quite likely that some teams will not make it past the D2 and later deliverables, if last year is anything to go by then we'll probably be down to a dozen or so teams by the day the competition starts.
It is open to everyone, and there are 6 US teams at the moment. See http://www.uavoutbackchallenge.com.au/2011/index.cfm?contentID=30 for a list of the teams.
I think as long as enough airframes are airworthy enough they will have to award points for method this year as by all things being equal he should be found many times.
I see there are several pretty professional airframes entering and yours is one of them Tridge.
To my mind it should be a collaboration rescue over a much bigger area. Even better if ground vehicles were roving as well. Still as its not actually be completed yet best to get that out the way first!
@ionut Not wanting to give anyone any ideas, but Tridge _does_ live in Canberra... ;-)
@anish, no we are not allowed to drop sensors. The rules specify that apart from the bottle, everything else has to come back to the airfield.
@gary, we're not counting on the car being there this year. You may have noticed the change in the wording in this years rules. Last year it said "The dummy will not be moving, will be located close
to his broken down vehicle...". This year the 2nd half of that sentence has been removed.
@chris, we bought a couple of the IR beacons that are used in the competition, and from the air they are not actually very powerful. We found that even in cloudy weather the IR signature is weaker than the signature from a reflective shirt.
-
1
-
2
of 2 Next