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
Can you guarantee there won't be any reflective shirts on the field?
If you can get the photogrammetry down pat, a few oblique, high-resolution camera shots from a DSLR at 120m would give you the equivalent of the 500m scout mode, without tower clearance. Use that to narrow down a few 'areas of interest' inside your geo-fence, and pass all of those at lower altitudes (80-40m) to get higher resolution shots. With those higher res shots, you'll be able to tell a beacon from a shirt.
It may be time that Ardupilot addresses better altitude sensing. We could be using a barometer / GPS fusion approach that would:
A) Detect altitude from GPS at launch, use that to calibrate pressure sensor for baseline air density gradient, in order to correct for number of millibars per meter being less in Denver than in New York.
B) Slowly build up barometer height to GPS height ratios at various altitudes in order to set an accurate baseline level for the barometer, and shift reliance for short-term height to it.
C) Periodically, slowly adjust this calibration to account for large changes in height or temperature.
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.
Anish: as Tridge mentioned in the beginning of the speech, Joe has his own powerful IR beacon.
@andrew quick question are u allowed to drop some sensors near Joe, IR reading near Joe might be useful :)
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