UAV Flight from Vieques to Puerto Rico!

Hello Everyone,

I am an aerospace engineering Ph.d student at a university in New York and also the teaching assistant for an undergraduate course in aircraft design which will be partly taught in Puerto Rico. One of the main objectives for the course is that the studens have to design, document, and build radio control airplanes following traditional design formulae. Having following this community for a while, I proposed to the course instructor and also my advisor to attempt to fly autonomously at least one of the student designed airplanes off the coast of Puerto Rico from the island of Vieques to mainland Puerto Rico which is close to 20 miles!! I have been given the approval and my plan is to use the Ardupilot with pre-programmed GPS way points to accomplish this at least semi-autonomously. The idea is to also establish visual contact during the entire flight using a chase boat. I would like to ask the community, whomever has successfully implemented and flown the Ardupilot system including wireless telemetry with the ardustation or otherwise, if you would be interested in being a consultant to the project. If so, leave me a comment with your contact information and I will get back to you with further details. We plan to fly the RC airplanes/ UAVs during the first week of June in Puerto Rico of course, just to give you a time frame. Thanks everyone, Victor.

Hi Guys, and morli thanks for all your feedback. Two things I am most concerned about are the following: The legal aspect of the flight, I'm assuming that if we can establish visual contact at all times, we would be exempt from having to deal with authorities with regard to the airspace and any UAV restrictions they may have. Does anyone know if this is correct? Then again we are dealing with Puerto Rico, and flying not over land but ocean, so who knows what the regulations are.

The other more minor concern is even if we can establish visual contact through a chase boat, could we wirelessly downlink the flight/navigation information to a laptop or send commands? What is the range on a set of Zigbee modules, or would we need something more robust? I assume we would need a range of at least 500 feet to properly maintain communication. As far as the heading accuracy and waypoint navigation I appreciate the heads up, this is something that we'll have to work out. The landing location accuracy is not too important, as long we make it accross the ocean we'll have plenty of space to land.

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Comments

Paul Marsh March 1, 2010 at 2:50pm

Can't wait to hear more. Best of luck, Victor.
Paul
Victor Maldonado March 1, 2010 at 9:36am

Hi everyone, Morli, Paul thank you for the information and advice, it will prove useful to me once I get up and running with this project soon. Stay tuned as I'm sure I'll be asking more technical questions once I encounter techincal difficulties. Paul, I read the entire article on Maynard Hill and it is very inspiring to say the least. Just to have a small fraction of his suceess on this project would be a great achievement. Stay tuned for a website as well to ducument the project and anything the students and I can contribute to the community.

Cheers,
Victor
Paul Marsh February 28, 2010 at 5:44am

Victor,

Click HERE for article on Maynard Hill's project if interested.

Paul
Paul Marsh February 28, 2010 at 5:32am

Victor,

You might try contacting the Acadamy of Model Aeronautics for info on legalities. Even though that's a US-based organization, they assisted Maynard Hill in his trans-Atlantic flight of an autonomous model airplane, which flew from Canada to Ireland. Indeed, the president of the AMA at the time took manual control of the plane for landing. Also, regarding propulsion, that plane flew for 38 hours and 1,900 miles on nitromethane. The plane that made the flight was classified as a "model airplane" in terms of overall size and weight. That overall project might prove good background for your own. Maybe someone associated with it could also advise you on your project. Again, the AMA might have background and/or contacts.

Hope this helps.

Paul
Andre S February 27, 2010 at 3:27am

You might be interested in the Corsica project documented over there in the Paparazzi wiki. The distance they are aiming at is 180km also over sea.
sid February 26, 2010 at 10:06pm

Victor,
WIreless communication range increases significantly over the sea due to humidity in air and no line of sight obstructions. SO you should get more then 10 miles with 500 mW.. I have personally noticed the same.
Regards
SID
Alexandre de Oliveira February 26, 2010 at 7:23pm

As far as I know, the XBee Pro has a range of operation of 1,6Km outdoors.
Victor Maldonado February 26, 2010 at 6:44pm

Hi Guys, and morli thanks for all your feedback. Two things I am most concerned about are the following: The legal aspect of the flight, I'm assuming that if we can establish visual contact at all times, we would be exempt from having to deal with authorities with regard to the airspace and any UAV restrictions they may have. Does anyone know if this is correct? Then again we are dealing with Puerto Rico, and flying not over land but ocean, so who knows what the regulations are.

The other more minor concern is even if we can establish visual contact through a chase boat, could we wirelessly downlink the flight/navigation information to a laptop or send commands? What is the range on a set of Zigbee modules, or would we need something more robust? I assume we would need a range of at least 500 feet to properly maintain communication. As far as the heading accuracy and waypoint navigation I appreciate the heads up, this is something that we'll have to work out. The landing location accuracy is not too important, as long we make it accross the ocean we'll have plenty of space to land.
Developer

Jason Short February 26, 2010 at 6:16pm

I think we're only talking a degree or two at that distance. I'll check tonight what the error is at 20 miles.
Developer

Jason Short February 26, 2010 at 2:55pm

Ardupilot uses a very fast approximation of heading. It won't be completely accurate at 20 miles. It will be pretty good but you need to run it in the debugger to see how much it's off. Maybe only a few degrees, and as you get closer the approximation will get more accurate.

If you add in some waypoints you should be in good shape, but you have to hit those waypoints to move on. If you think this is an issue, we can come up with another scheme.

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