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.
Please allow me express a few thoughts when one asks himself which altitude could be obtained if climbing for real.
-First (as you certainly considered) the decreasing density decreases the performance with altitude. Some computations could probably estimate the altitude you would have achieved if climbing for real.
-But a second aspect is more difficult to estimate as it depends on the implemented control strategy and loops. I would be interested to see some airspeed plots of the latter flights, as when you constantly descend again, it is very likely that there is some kinetic/potential energy exchange that helps to climb the first meters "for free" (especially with a higher aspect ratio aircraft).
I think this is how it stands for overall all three rounds combined
Vassilis 24
Mark Griffin 16
Brian Wolfe 13
Krzysztof Bosak 13
Brakar 13
Andrus Kangro 12
Jesse Jared 8
MarcS 6
Bill Premerlani 6
IOS 6
Sami Finnila 5
Chris Anderson 3
Icebear 1
Gary,
I didn't mean my post as a submission. I don't think it would be fair anyway since that flight was back from September before the T3-3
Since the inspiration behind the competition was to compare to the Stanford record, my goal was to clarify that the official record attempts had used less than half of the batteries' capacity due to winds blowing us off of the allowed airspace. So I was just trying to give the people competing in the T3-round3 a more realistic number to compare to.
As far as I am concerned, getting to 3000m is a feat (that's what all the teams in the class had done on a 2100mAh battery), and Chris and MarcS surpassed that. A little bit over 4000m was the best we had done with a 2600mAh battery, and Mark definitely broke that. But I find it interesting that although we had different airframes and completely different size of batteries, we achieved similar efficiencies.
Either ways, it was cool to keep track of the competition! Curious to see what the next one is going to be :)
Zouhair, perhaps you could furnish a little more information, I see that your climb topped out at 200m but that must be because you have 60m tall obstructions around you. Do you have a KML and numbers for the total climb?? Maybe I missed it but I can't see either, I have to put the rubbish out for the bin men that might take me maybe 24 hours before I get round to posting the results but Mark chickening out just below 20k seems to have it ;-)
Joe, Im very sorry but I can't allow the entry from you guys, it broke the not above 400' rule, but I say that with my tail between my legs as I have followed Dans work for a couple of years and I often quote it as the way forward and containing mucho coolness. Those members here that have not looked at the links here should. We are truly honoured to have such a team join our little bun fight.
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.
Comments
Please allow me express a few thoughts when one asks himself which altitude could be obtained if climbing for real.
-First (as you certainly considered) the decreasing density decreases the performance with altitude. Some computations could probably estimate the altitude you would have achieved if climbing for real.
-But a second aspect is more difficult to estimate as it depends on the implemented control strategy and loops. I would be interested to see some airspeed plots of the latter flights, as when you constantly descend again, it is very likely that there is some kinetic/potential energy exchange that helps to climb the first meters "for free" (especially with a higher aspect ratio aircraft).
Vassilis 24
Mark Griffin 16
Brian Wolfe 13
Krzysztof Bosak 13
Brakar 13
Andrus Kangro 12
Jesse Jared 8
MarcS 6
Bill Premerlani 6
IOS 6
Sami Finnila 5
Chris Anderson 3
Icebear 1
That should be better ;-)
I didn't mean my post as a submission. I don't think it would be fair anyway since that flight was back from September before the T3-3
Since the inspiration behind the competition was to compare to the Stanford record, my goal was to clarify that the official record attempts had used less than half of the batteries' capacity due to winds blowing us off of the allowed airspace. So I was just trying to give the people competing in the T3-round3 a more realistic number to compare to.
As far as I am concerned, getting to 3000m is a feat (that's what all the teams in the class had done on a 2100mAh battery), and Chris and MarcS surpassed that. A little bit over 4000m was the best we had done with a 2600mAh battery, and Mark definitely broke that. But I find it interesting that although we had different airframes and completely different size of batteries, we achieved similar efficiencies.
Either ways, it was cool to keep track of the competition! Curious to see what the next one is going to be :)
Zouhair
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:
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