Its been a while so lets try again. Had a hangout with Chris and we briefly spoke about the next T3 round. Chris will work on a top prize ;-)
The mission is simple, get airborne climb to 20m
Fly a cube with 50m sides, pausing for one minute at each corner, so your flight time cannot be anything less than 8 minutes..... Bonus points if you can stay longer at each corner....
The neatest cube KML wins.
If you can do this with a 3D aircraft I feel you would have a very strong chance of winning!
I will close the competition on April the 14th. I will be looking at where you are flying very closely. Please don't try this in public places or within 500m of any building / road.
Comments
If I understood the thread at the AQ forum correctly, the trace shown is using the reported baro reading, not the GPS altitude. And therefore the track is what the system believed it's height to be, not what it really was?
The AQ uses the MP3H6115A pressure sensor with a little open cell foam covering it and out of direct sunlight.
The code is all open source except for a couple of programs that are provided that does the curve fitting for the calibration.
The hardware is closed but everything hardware wise is openly discussed it's just the schematics aren't available to help prevent cloning.
I'm disappointed that more AQ flyers didn't post but I know of one plot that is excellent and he worked pretty hard to do it sitting on a snow mobile. I hope it will show up soon.
Needless to say, I'm very impressed with the AQ entry...I guess they use inertial navigation? ..but they also use the older BMP085 baro which we use to use on the APM1 and I know is not that great..which makes the performance that much more impressive..
I hope we see more AQ entries as well and I would even be nice if one or two of them showed up at Sparkfun's AVC.
If we can get a day or two without wind and rain, I definitely need to try this. I haven't tried anything too fancy with missions yet - is there away to re-use a waypoint? So for example if WP1 is a low corner of the cub and you wnat to get back to that same WP, can you do it or do you need to create a new on in the same location?
Nice work! Good to see the competition...believe it or not, we're really not here to belittle competitors. It keeps us all on our toes and innovating! It's good to see you using QGC and MAVlink, and that AQ is mostly open source. I think we have something to learn from the calibration process AQ uses to make their HW so precise. Freezer? Wow.
Thanks for all the nice comments. A very helpfull program to improve multi-rotor performance is Ecalc.
It acutally shows a 36 minute duration for my configuration but they don't have the exact prop I am using. My basic configuration has flown way over an hour with a special battery pack.
Ecalc
@ R_Lefebvre: Mudslinging? Nah, just poking a bit. ;-)
I hope we'll see more entries before the clock strikes but ... I haven't heard and seen of any other forum discussing the challenge.
But who knows? Maybe everyone's just trying to squeeze the last knot out of their lines...
Super results Steve,
It also makes me think that a Discussion, a Blog or even a Wiki entry should be put together that deals with duration, capacity and performance issues for multicopters.
The rest of us work around 10 to 15 minute flights, 42 minutes is a whole different ball game.
Interesting thread. A bit of mudslinging, but, whatever. Those are great results. Good for you guys. I haven't seen much in the way of results from other systems.
Now, can AQ fly a helicopter? ;)
Are there any MK guys waiting to Snipe this event too?
Oh well, at least I should still get "The most use of 4WD to get into the field" award. :D
FYI: Here's the discussion about the challenge at the AutoQuad forum:
http://forum.autoquad.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=2193
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