With a range in excess of 100m and able to measure over water, the SF11/C is the most cost effective laser altimeter for drones on the market today. Compatibility with Pixhawk and derivative flight controllers and its multiple interfaces including serial, I2C, analog and USB make the SF11/C the easiest plug-and-play solution for altitude holding, terrain following and safe landing.
The SF11/C was developed to handle the unpredictable real-world conditions that sensors face when attached to a drone. Environmental factors including vibration, wind, noise, temperature fluctuations and extreme contrasts in lighting from brilliant sunshine to pitch dark are all managed by the SF11/C, and whilst all this is going on, the SF11/C measures to rapidly changing terrain, giving stable results over wet and dry surfaces without producing false readings.
Tests conducted by the Center for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modeling at the University of St Andrews in Scotland demonstrated the abilities of the SF11/C over wetlands and open water. Their requirement for consistent results under these difficult conditions were easily met by the SF11/C, contributing to important conservation work.
An important characteristic of the SF11/C is its long measuring range. This is especially useful during changes of roll or pitch angle. Data from the IMU is used to correct for geometric effects during such maneuvers, but this only works correctly when there is valid measurement data from the laser. The long measuring range of the SF11/C makes this possible as you can see from the graph below.
The green line is the roll angle, the purple line is the barometric height referenced to sea level and the red line is the uncorrected, AGL altitude from the SF11/C. During tight turns the measured distance increases significantly but the long range capability of the SF11/C keeps the ground clearly in view.
More details about the SF11/C can be downloaded from the website. The SF11/C is manufactured by LightWare Optoelectronics (Pty) Ltd based in South Africa. LightWare has been designing and manufacturing laser altimeters for the drone market for 5 years and is committed to providing high quality products to the industry. The official distributors in the USA are Parallax and Acroname.
Special thanks go to the dev team for their contributions to the driver software and Tridge for his tireless and occasionally incendiary flight testing ;).
Comments
This sensor deserves gimbal http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__55238__Quanum_Q_2D_Brush...
Sounds like a cool project. Gotta enter the next OBC just for the fun! We don't have an Aussie distributor listed on our site so if you know someone feel free to put them in touch.
We have some interesting "3d" ground mapping lasers coming out during the year. Right now we're working on getting the weight down as low as possible.
We also have multi-beam lasers already in production (SF33/T) that cast a triangular pattern on the ground (think Predator) and they can be used to check for obstacles on the ground during vertical descent - the three beams get closer together as the UAV gets closer to the ground so it creates a simple map of the area using the motion and descent of the aircraft to cover a larger area.
No team link sorry...all top secret and all...don't believe in open source...can't be competitive then, plus doesn't make any cash! ;-) Lolz.
We're using a sub 2kg electric quadplane pusher prop. We "only" have to VTOL pick up 100g vial over 60km in an hour so why go bigger? Avoinics/camera is less than 300g, 700g frame, the rest is li-ion batteries. Can always squeeze in a SF11 though! :-)
When are you getting them back in stock and do you have an Aussie re-seller? Currently I don't think we will need one as we're trying to run as light as possible (pun intended). The terrain is very flat, and landing VTOL is done fairly slowly anyway. But hey I'm always up to try out new gadgets! A scanning one would be more interesting to avoid obstacles on landing.
LOL! Hey JB, what kind of bird are you planning to use? Do you have a link to your team?
Laser Dev...Sweet. I already knew that! Why do you think I'm trying so hard? ;-)
Tridge has run flight testing on our SF10 product using the I2C, serial and analog outputs at the same time. We use the same drivers on the SF11/C so there should be no problems from a functional perspective.
Our view is that I2C is not a suitable communications protocol to be using on drones. It is too susceptible to noise and the bus freezes if one of the attached peripherals has a problem. If at all possible, we recommend using the serial port, but if you do need to use the I2C port then the SF11/C uses a very simple request and reply structure in order to reduce the possibility of errors. I2C address setup is done through the USB port to make it really simple to configure.
Hi Tridge/LaserDeveloper,
Thankyou for the feed back about this. I use lidarlite V2. Although the price is very attractive the performance is not so much. For testing purposes it is OK, but for real missions, too noisy. Sometimes it adds offset of few meters on it's own. I just have one question, you say you use serial interface. Does I2C in this have some issues or you have not used it to comment about it.
Thanks
@JB - We are one of the sponsors of OBC 2016 and are giving each of the 20 finalists a choice of the SF10/B or the SF11/C, so if all goes well you might be getting one for free :).
@James masterman - thank you for the kind comments. The SF11/C complies with the IEC eye safety regulations and has FDA accession approval. At this time we are not aware of any additional regulatory requirements for the Aus market although these regulations are updated from time to time.
@DG - water tests have been conducted over dams and the sea. The main limitations are that both the maximum and minimum operating ranges are affected but by how much depends on the surface condition and transparency of the water.
Are there limitations to working over water?
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