NASA Ames Excursion

I was fortunate to be a part of the DIYDrone trip to NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) yesterday at Moffett Field in Santa Clara. We were treated of wide variety of conversations with NASA's UAV professionals including Chad Frost, our sponsor for the day. (Thanks Chad and everyone else @NASA!). For those who couldn't make it, here is a little writeup of the excursion:

Chad began by leading the dozen of us through security checkpoints to the 'escort required' side of Moffett Field and the UAV hangars. The first stop was a commercial UAV platform, an orange Calaban heli airframe, customized with an array of mission video and scanning laser sensors (in addition to the flight related sensors). Interestingly it used a PC running a tweaked Linux as the top layer managing OS. Sensors (ie GPS, 3axis accs, etc) were running in their own environments and feeding the outer loop(s?) system. The ground station(s) were housed in a trailer and received realtime updates from the UAV. Check out the imaging of us standing in front of the heli!

Next stop was a the largest research platform that Chad is working.

The Sierra frame has flow 41 times, 11 with payloads. It was just returned from Norway (No, it did't go off course!) doing some atmospheric science.

We were next shown a 41' wingspan Swift glider that is to be retrofitted with an electric motor and converted to a UAV. It should be able to take payloads up to about 220 lbs in total toward their goal of learning about green efforts in the UAV arena.(See my album for the spec sheet) Last we saw a 1/3 scale Piper cub that is being worked on to research dynamic adjustments of control surface, unless that was another one of the many other projects and offices we crashed.I was pleased to meet a sampling of the DIYDrones.com members too. I think we all learned quite a bit from NASA and each other and our projects. More pictures are in albums under:

I know I've left out a ton of detail (like Google's Dornier Alpha) so please comment on you experiences below and post links to your pix.

Thanks again to Chris and Chad for getting this together. The next time a field tip that comes up, I recommend you jump on it.

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Comments

paul hubner September 4, 2009 at 9:36am

Chad - You and each of the team members that we spoke to were great - It was like drinking from a firehose for me! Thanks for posting the individuals who lead each effort. I find it amazing the level of detail and the very specific projects that each team is researching. Whereas we are building the entire platform from near the ground up, your people have very focused objectives, (ie "dynamic control surface adjustment" etc). This modular approach creates reuable packages for other teams - good idea!

I mostly enjoyed sampling the atmosphere where everyone was truly excited and appreciative of the creative environment where they work.

thanks again!
Paul
Chad Frost September 3, 2009 at 3:26pm

It's great to hear that everyone enjoyed the visit so much -- I'd like to make sure credit goes where it's due:
- The Autonomous Rotorcraft Project is conducted by the U.S. Army's Aeroflightdynamics Directorate, led by Matt Whalley. The SIERRA UAV has been developed by NASA Ames' Earth Science Division, and the project is led by Matt Fladeland. Corey Ippolito leads the Intelligent Systems Division's Exploration Vehicles lab, and is responsible for developing our smaller UAVs and the Swift electric-UAV project. Each of these projects is, of course, supported by numerous additional folks -- it's truly a team effort to get any of these vehicles into the air!

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