Posted by Chris Anderson on September 29, 2009 at 2:08pm
[UPDATE: This one proved a bit harder than we thought, so we're going to extend the deadline by two weeks, to 12:00 midnight PST on Sunday, October 18th.
Also, here's a preview of next month's contest: Break the Stanford team's UAV altitude record of 7,142 feet by doing at least 24 circles with a 300ft climb and descent in each! (This won't really beat his official record, because there won't be an official judge there. But you'll get bragging rights, at least). I'll announce full details on Oct 19th]
The first Trust Time Trial (T3) contest was a great success. Lots of entries, nail-biting competition, awesome performances and lots of learning for all.
Now comes round two. The difference this time are as follows:
--Three laps
--3D waypoints. (must hit altitude targets as well as lat/long)
The prize this time is a Global Hawk kit.
Winning entries must be posted in the comments below by midnight PST on Sunday, October 4th 18th.
Rules:
1) Must complete the pattern as shown above, totally autonomously. Go into autonomous mode before waypoint 1 and stay in for three laps. The four points are arranged in a square, with 200m on a side (obviously the two diagonal paths are longer). Any aircraft/autopilot allowed. It doesn't matter how close to the waypoints you get, as long as you pass on the outside of them.
2) Altitude must be within +-10m of given altitude at each waypoint. It doesn't matter what your altitude is in between waypoints. All altitudes are either above launch position or the contestant's specified "safety altitude".
3) Fastest time to complete three laps and hit the 3D waypoints wins. Must provide GPS track with timestamps and on-board video. (If you don't have/can't afford a small onboard videocamera like the FlyCamOne 2, we'll let it go this time. But in the future: video or it didn't happen!)
GPS tracks are best achieved with an onboard GPS datalogger, like the i-Blue 747 or smaller Sanav ML-7. But if you don't have one or don't want to add the weight, you can just capture the GPS track from your telemetry stream, although you'll have to figure out how to convert it to KML format to export to Google Earth (see below). If your Ground Control System has a built-in map+track function, a screen shot of that is fine, but it should be possible for people to check to confirm that your leg lengths are at least 200m.
Evidence data should include these four things:
1) Total time, along with aircraft and autopilot used. A photo of the aircraft would be nice.
2) Screen capture of path exported to Google Earth or an equivalent, annotated with waypoints and where autonomy began and ended. :
3) GPS datalog file, any format
4) Onboard video, embedded from YouTube or Vimeo. [Not absolutely required but requested]
Well, T3 round two may be over, but I'd at least like to publish the results of my team's pass at the T3-2 course.
A combination of factors including bad weather kept us grounded until last Sunday, October 25th. Our flight schedule for the day included tuning the gains for our autopilot, testing it's performance, collecting imagery, and making auto-landing approaches. The T3-2 pattern was appended to the performance testing of the gains. The first pass at the course was done with no altitude changes.
The second pass was done with full altitude changes, and the results were amazing. I have run the course many times in simulation, but was impressed at how closely reality mirrored the simulation. We completed the course in 267 seconds. There were a number of areas that I would have liked to improve on, but the competition was already over and we had a number of other tasks to accomplish.
Summary:
Total Time: 267 secconds
Autopilot: Piccolo LT
Aircraft: "ArcWulf" a Heavily Modified 8Foot Telemaster
Below is a link to the wiki page for the flight test complete with system details and lots of photos!
Our Plane:
I'll make sure to convert our telemetry into a KML file and get the screenshots of the path posted this weekend. I am looking forward to T3-3.
Comments
I am moving on to other projects (ArduPilot+ArduIMU=?), but if you put up a better time I may have to revisit T3V2 ;)
SuperStar EP with brushelss & Lipo, ArduPilot with V2.4 firmware.
I have done minimal tuning. I can see that this autopilot and airframe could easily turn in a time in the 250 second range if I worked at it.
G
http://art1.mae.ncsu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/FlightTest25Oct09
A combination of factors including bad weather kept us grounded until last Sunday, October 25th. Our flight schedule for the day included tuning the gains for our autopilot, testing it's performance, collecting imagery, and making auto-landing approaches. The T3-2 pattern was appended to the performance testing of the gains. The first pass at the course was done with no altitude changes.
The second pass was done with full altitude changes, and the results were amazing. I have run the course many times in simulation, but was impressed at how closely reality mirrored the simulation. We completed the course in 267 seconds. There were a number of areas that I would have liked to improve on, but the competition was already over and we had a number of other tasks to accomplish.
Summary:
Total Time: 267 secconds
Autopilot: Piccolo LT
Aircraft: "ArcWulf" a Heavily Modified 8Foot Telemaster
Below is a link to the wiki page for the flight test complete with system details and lots of photos!
Our Plane:
I'll make sure to convert our telemetry into a KML file and get the screenshots of the path posted this weekend. I am looking forward to T3-3.
TotalClimb.exe
Command line tool for calculating total climb. Public Domain.
Time to scrub that image from our minds and move on to T3-3. ...Please.
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