First, congratualulations to Brian Wolfe, the winner of the second round of the T3 Contest. Now it's time for Round 3.
This round's objective is to 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, as shown above. (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).
The winner will have the highest cumulative altitude, but anyone who exceeds 7,142 feet will win a prize.
As usual, you must submit a KML track and video in the comments below. Evidence that fun was had is welcome (and may influence Gary's point assignment blackmagic equation), but is not required.
Deadline is Midnight PST on November 29th.
Oh I looked up and the 29th had happened, I will sort the results now, what an interesting contest this one was with really cracking entries, seems like this community of UAS enthusiasts is able to bang out some fantastic results using many platforms. Just think 5 years ago when many of us started dipping our toes in the water, rudder turns and chunky althold was the order of the day. A well done for keeping it civil also needs to be said. Thank goodness people do here.
Chris and I have discussed the next contest, should work for all of us as its probably what we are all about. I will let him announce it.
Remember a DIYdrones month has now been declared as lasting six weeks.
On the 15th of November I had the opportunity to run the T3-3 course while working with Dan Edwards on his autonomous glider. We were out flying in order to tune the motor on the glider, and the T3-3 course fit nicely as a way to finish the day. There is no video available since this attempt was just seizing an opportunity.
Summary:
Total Laps: 20 Laps for a climb of 6000 feet.
Autopilot: Piccolo II
Aircraft: eSBXC 14' Powered Glider
Dan has a great summary of the overall flight test at his website:
Some pictures of the flight path:
In the first image you can see two distinct circles. The outer orbit was used for climbs and the inner orbit was used for descent. Because the aircraft is a glider, it took a long time for it to come down.
In the second picture you can clearly see when we were hitting thermals on the 4th and 8th laps. During those times the engine was turned off, but we continued to gain altitude. It is less clear if those same thermals aided us during our ascents.
When the altitudes were plotted out you can clearly see that during the flight we continued to modify the parameters of the flight plan. By increasing the velocity that the aircraft was allowed to travel at during the descent we not only descended faster, but we were also able to recover that energy and use it to regain altitude. During the final few laps, the motor never even reached 100% output during its climb.
If we had had another opportunity to fly T3-3 with our more efficient flight plan we could easily have added on another few laps. To implement the more efficient flight plan required a lot of manual entry of data. In the future I would definitely put together a plug-in to handle that.
I'm seeing some awesome runs here after a week away. I was considering the possibility of putting in a bigger battery, tweaking the code and getting another run in, but seeings how I just got back from a glorious week in Hawaii (neener neener neener) and it's windy today, I'm going to relax the rest of the weekend and look at improving the autopilot during the next competition phase. There is so much left for me to do like flying a true circle, hooking up a pitot, closing the speed loop..........
I finished the T3-3 comptition yesterday evening, as usual by landing in a tree. Thank you for the tip about the loc8or Gary, that one really saved the day!
Here is the altitude-plot:
KML-plot:
KML-file, (perhaps a bit corrupted because of battery death, if so some zooming will be required): log.txt.trace001.kml
Total flight time was 3044 sec, close to 51 min.
Setup was EasyUAV with FlexiPilot and 5000mAh Turnigy LiPo.
Thanks for your kind words and calculations, Zouhair. I cannot seem to do better than 25% efficiency with my optimizations.
Here is a video I took from near the ground station of a few climbs/descends. I had to stop as I was getting dizzy. You can hear the motor cut in once the lower altitude limit is reached. I will put up another video of the ground station in due course.....
But just to set the 'record' straight. Our official attempts were plagued with winds aloft, so they were shorter than we usually can do. So just for reference, here's and altitude plot back from summer flights. We were capable of slightly over 4000m on a 2600 mAh battery which works out to be
.42*9.81*4000/(7*2.6*3600) ~= 25%, so roughly the same efficiency :)
Again, congratulations on such good performance.
(black is RC. Landed after some trimming then took-off and landed autonomously)
Comments
Chris and I have discussed the next contest, should work for all of us as its probably what we are all about. I will let him announce it.
Remember a DIYdrones month has now been declared as lasting six weeks.
BTW. Some details after brakar's flight, one 'artistic' image of what really happened:
The groundtrip accumulated up to... 63.74km.The time on logs was 2x compressed - as there was a constant for log freqeuncy
(brakar used 4Hz thinking that 8Hz).
The flight time was 101m 23s.
http://goosetech.homelinux.com/soaring/journal.php?sxEntryID=95
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1142977
Summary:
Total Laps: 20 Laps for a climb of 6000 feet.
Autopilot: Piccolo II
Aircraft: eSBXC 14' Powered Glider
Dan has a great summary of the overall flight test at his website:
Some pictures of the flight path:
In the first image you can see two distinct circles. The outer orbit was used for climbs and the inner orbit was used for descent. Because the aircraft is a glider, it took a long time for it to come down.
In the second picture you can clearly see when we were hitting thermals on the 4th and 8th laps. During those times the engine was turned off, but we continued to gain altitude. It is less clear if those same thermals aided us during our ascents.
When the altitudes were plotted out you can clearly see that during the flight we continued to modify the parameters of the flight plan. By increasing the velocity that the aircraft was allowed to travel at during the descent we not only descended faster, but we were also able to recover that energy and use it to regain altitude. During the final few laps, the motor never even reached 100% output during its climb.
If we had had another opportunity to fly T3-3 with our more efficient flight plan we could easily have added on another few laps. To implement the more efficient flight plan required a lot of manual entry of data. In the future I would definitely put together a plug-in to handle that.
More photos at:
Great runs guys,
Brian
Here is the altitude-plot:
KML-plot:
KML-file, (perhaps a bit corrupted because of battery death, if so some zooming will be required): log.txt.trace001.kml
Total flight time was 3044 sec, close to 51 min.
Setup was EasyUAV with FlexiPilot and 5000mAh Turnigy LiPo.
Cheers, brakar
Here is a video I took from near the ground station of a few climbs/descends. I had to stop as I was getting dizzy. You can hear the motor cut in once the lower altitude limit is reached. I will put up another video of the ground station in due course.....
Cheers, Mark
But just to set the 'record' straight. Our official attempts were plagued with winds aloft, so they were shorter than we usually can do. So just for reference, here's and altitude plot back from summer flights. We were capable of slightly over 4000m on a 2600 mAh battery which works out to be
.42*9.81*4000/(7*2.6*3600) ~= 25%, so roughly the same efficiency :)
Again, congratulations on such good performance.
(black is RC. Landed after some trimming then took-off and landed autonomously)
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