3D model of the planned colonial town of Mawchu Llacta in highland Peru, reconstructed from 241 aerial photos.

From NBC

Maybe all Indiana Jones needed was a good hat and a whip, but if he'd seen what archaeologists are using these days, even he might be jealous. From drones that perform high-fidelity 3-D scans to apps that automatically scour satellite data for undiscovered sites, the past has never looked more futuristic.

"Sites are disappearing all over the world due to looting, urban sprawl, warfare and other threats," said Steve Wernke, an archaeologist and associate professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. It's important, he said, to document them fully as soon as possible, because we only get one chance. Using unmanned aerial vehicles and advanced imaging techniques — two things Wernke is an early adopter of — makes a huge difference.

"It really provides better data, more precise data, more accurate data, and much faster. It's really an amazing thing to witness," he said.

Wernke works in Peru, where he and others are busily documenting ancient structures like Qhapaq Nan, the Incan "royal highway" that was recently awarded World Heritage Site status. What better tool to collect data on these miles of half-buried roads than an eagle-eyed UAV?

The drone is equipped with an ordinary camera, pointed down and set to take a picture every half a second. The thousands of overlapping pictures of the landscape are crunched by what's called a photogrammetry application. The result: highly detailed, accurate representations of the area like the one above.

Smaller 3-D capture systems can be suspended (or hover) over excavations, recording the dig layer by layer and noting the precise position and dimensions of every stone, pottery fragment and arrowhead. It's less work for the grad students, who can be set on more important tasks (like piloting drones).

"I imagine in the future archaeologists won't have just one of these things, but have a sort of quiver of drones," Wernke predicted, "from large-scale survey ones to lower-altitude stuff, the quad-rotors, to site-specific ones."

At the very least there will be plenty of options as to what kind of gear to put on these drones. Jesse Casana of the University of Arkansas uses a highly original technique of capturing thermal imagery of the landscape, revealing features that were nearly invisible to the naked eye.

"People have been theorizing it was possible since the '70s," Casana explained to NBC News. "There was just no way to do it. You needed this liquid nitrogen-cooled camera flown overhead by a plane. Today, they're tiny, the size of a quarter."

Casana has also dabbled in research that automates the process of finding new sites: Feature-extraction software could scrub through thousands of aerial images looking for unusual patterns. It would have to be checked, of course. "There's a very important role for human analysis," he said.

Drones are still problematic mechanically, though, and can be legally dubious in some places. In Cyprus, Casana said, "We were actually arrested and detained for a day while the police decided whether or not what we were doing was illegal." Still, he reported that all his colleagues either had or wanted UAVs for some purpose or another.

Saving the past

It's not just far-flung temples and ruins that are getting the high-tech archival treatment. CyArk is an organization whose mission is to record the world's most important and endangered places in extreme detail and make that data available to as many people as possible.

"We were started in response to the catastrophic loss of heritage sites and monuments," said Elizabeth Lee, CyArk's vice president.

CyArk uses a system called LiDAR, which bounces lasers off the surrounding area much the way radar uses radio waves. It produces a 3-D "point cloud," a dense collection of coordinates that can be woven together into a solid 3-D model.

Wernke enthuses about the technology: "In areas with a lot of tree cover, the LiDAR can tell the canopy from the ground, so you get what we call a bare earth model, just ground and all the architectural features you're looking for. It's been really, really transformative."

For example, he says, anthropologists used to think of the huge Inca temples in the forest as religious centers, visited by far-flung families to pay their respects to the gods. But high-tech scanning revealed evidence of a large and permanent population near the temples. "They were living all around there, in this huge agricultural sociey, managing and farming that forest — and we really only know that because of LiDAR," he said.

Geologists are getting into the fun, too, contributing and drawing from a growing database of high-resolution imagery of faults, slips and other tectonic features stored at OpenTopography.

With the ground LiDAR system getting the lay of the land and drones capturing finer details like frescoes and decorations, CyArk and its partners have already documented scores of sites, from Qing tombs in China, to famous cathedrals in Europe, to modern landmarks like the Washington Monument. One new project aims to record some endangered artifacts of the early industrial era: enormous cantilever cranes in Nagasaki, Japan.

"The data we're capturing is measurable and accurate, and can be used in ongoing restoration and preservation efforts onsite," explained Lee. And the hundreds of terabytes of data aren't just being used by academics. This kind of rich data is useful in lesson plans for kids who have grown up with 3-D games like Minecraft, who learn by interacting and exploring. You can get a taste of the captures with this online viewer.

LiDAR is great, but it's also expensive and bulky. It's shrinking in size and price, but both Wernke and Lee were excited about something smaller still: Google's Project Tango, a phone-like device packed with sensors that can record every detail of its movement, the room it's in, and the items in it.

"If Google is trying to put these sensors in every phone, how can we use that to capture the environment, use that capability?" wondered Lee. "The democratization of the technology has been really exciting for us."

Wernke sees it as a huge cost and labor savings. "In archaeology we work with really small budgets, and these laser scanners are like $40,000," he lamented. "If we could just have our students whip out there phones..."

But what happens when all that data is unleashed? Wernke is worried that the infrastructure won't be able to keep up with the tools — although companies like Google have shown they're willing to help host and administrate huge amounts of data like the Cancer Genome Atlas. CyArk has already had to shift its focus from capture (which it still does, but through partners) to archival and making the data widely available.

Access to this data, Lee pointed out, seems to be the next big problem to solve — but with broadband, rich media in our browsers and devices, and near-unlimited cloud storage, we may be well on our way already.

OK...this image above is boring... If you don't feel to read now, just go further down and watch videos. I hope that will bring you back at my story here. Enjoy...

In the research world, the Friday experiment is what researchers often do at the end of a hard working week. Basically, they give a try to a wild, crazy and unsupported idea, just to see the outcome.

My Friday experiment was triggered while passing by an out runner motor sitting on a shelf near my 3D printer. This motor and three others were acquired many month ago and never used since their specs were not compatible with my current projects. I had in my mind an idea of a little quad airframe that would be built very tightly around a Pixhawk controller. So, why not use those motors an a 3D printed hub designed to hug the Pixhawk. I fired up fusion 360 to draw the required parts, stuffed the STL files in my Replicator 2X that I recently successfully tuned for nylon printing and pressed start. The resulting parts were simple and nearly indestructible. Finally, after some assembling and tweaking the final product was ready for a test flight. So imagine a crude Quad Rotor with some unbalanced three blade props that I could not wait to test even if it was a dark late evening.

First impression at arming...something is wrong! Motors spin OK but so quietly. Gave a bit of throttle... not much more sound. A bit more, which was still very little and my Quad just jump in the air. At first, I thought that I messed with the ESC calibration but after disarming and reviewing everything, it jumped to my face! I have built a little overpowered Quad. I later validated that it loitered at around 30% throttle. Since then, every flight of this little Quad were at turn very relaxing because of noise, stability and versatility and amazing because of performances. With some small changes it became even more and I now call my creation LQTC.

Please allow me to introduce my LQTC1, The Little Quad That Can...

Initial prototype was a lozenge shaped hub that wrap around a Pixhawk. Four T-Rex 450 helicopter carbon fiber tail boom locked solid in this hub. Simple motor mount can slide in any position on the round arm (T-Rex tail boom). Some velcro and double face tape securing a four in one 20 amps ESC (Q-Brain ESC) plus a set of tie-raps for batteries.

Here are the original specs of LQTC1:

AX-2810Q 750Kv outrunners

Q-Brain 4x20 amp ESC

Master Aircrew 9 x 6 3 blade propellers

T-Rex 450 carbon fiber tail booms

Custom design 3D printed center hub and motors mounts

240 g airframe

880 g vehicle without batteries

Qty(2) 4S 3700 mAh Zippy compact Lipo weighting 355g each

All up Weight 1590g

I don't have picture or video of that config but here is the result of a test I did:

With the 9x6 Master Airscrew Propellers the current draw was close to 20 Amps so I switched to 10x5 Graupner 2 blades Props which draw 15 Amps. With that setup, a full loiter flight gave a 26 min. flight duration.

On a second flight, I added a few dead lipo's as weight. Total extra weight was 655g for an AUW of 2245g. Flight duration achieved 16 min. flight duration with a loiter throttle setting of 70%.

Being very happy with those results, I decided to refine the platform which added some weight but enhance the overall look of my LQTC. Since then, I have tried 10,11,12 inches Graupner size props with the original AX-2810Q 750 Kv outrunner and currently, it is flying with an AX-4008Q 620Kv hooked to the 12x6 Graupner prop powered by two 4S 5200 mAh multistar batteries.

For unbelievable performances, the AX-2810Q with 10x5 Graupner is the way to go. On qty(2) Zippy compact 4S 3700 mAh it gave without a payload an autonomy of 25 minutes. For the rest of this blog, lets call it config 1.

For best compromise between performances and payload, the AX-4008Q 620 Kv with 12x6 Graupner propellers and 2 x 4s 5200 mAh multistar lipos seems an interesting setup to consider. Flying is a bit more sluggish but still very impressive in my opinion. For the rest of this blog, lets call it config 2.

So, enough reading and lets watch some videos and pictures...

I will first start with a no payload flight video in config 1 (you may observe that airframe design was slightly different from the pictures below).

Now here is a video I did myself while flying the Quad so my apologies for the jerkiness of the video. It is flying in config 2 with a 1 kg payload on a sling. Weight without load is 2Kg (including 2 x 4s 5200 mAh multistar lipos (770g). So lets see it fly with an AUW of 3Kg.

Now that you've seen it, lets make a few comments:

1- Flight time was 18 minutes. I inadvertently shut down recording close to the end but restarted it right away (reason for two videos up there).

2- For this flight, you can download and analyze my flash log here.

3- without the payload, I get 35 min. flight time (80% loiter and 20% more aggressive flying with 15% battery capacity remaining).

4- the jerkiness you observe in that video is a more amplified version of something I observed when I fly on the EKF mode. DCM mode is smoother. Without a payload, there is no jerking at all in DCM and, in EKF, there is a more subtle version of the jerkiness seen in that video. Something I want to investigate later but I would appreciate your comments in that regard.

5- Oh! and almost miraculous, vibration level on all axis is flirting with zero value. I must have been doing something right...or nylon has special properties or both.

Finally, here is a link to my Fklickr album for more pictures and videos of my Little Quad That Can (LQTC) and also some of my other projects. Interestingly, you will see pictures of the next iteration called LOTC for Little Octo That Can.

I don't know what I will do from here, give the STL files as open source, start a kickstarter campaign(maybe an Multirotor Experimentation Kit) or sell the printed parts online. One thing is sure, I would love to see my realization becoming the Quad of the people and who knows, eclipse DJI 450. In my opinion, this platform is ideal

Am I wrong or this little Quad is a marvel? Please tell me gently...

Regards,

Mario

Husband And Wife Team Unveil The World's First 3D-Printed Graphene Battery

Graphene 3D Investor Video from Shufflebox Productions, LLC on Vimeo.

ConservationDrones.org has benefited tremendously from the generous support of many groups. We are launching a new initiative to pay this forward.

If you have 'preloved' drone equipment in working order that are just lying around gathering dust and rust, why not donate them to needy users, especially student groups, around the world who might be struggling to build their first  drone for conservation research and applications. We will try to connect donors with recipients. Please fill in this form to participate in this worthy cause!

MAVPilot for iPhone has been release. This is a "Ground Control Station for your Pocket". Its target audience is iPhone users (iPad version will come later). Pilots often fly unaccompanied and this can make it difficult to use a laptop at the same time. This is more so when a pilot is using a semi-auto modes like Alt-Hold etc... Using your iPhone instead of a laptop is a great way to keep focused on the MAV and still have all the useful information in reach. With in built text-to-speech support your iPhone will let you know instantly the status of your MAV as you are flying.

MAVPilot incorporates the  FIND MY DRONE feature.

Features Targeted for V1.0 of MAVPilot

• Telemetry Screen showing flight information e.g
  • Speed
  • Altitude
  • Yaw
  • Rate of Climb
  • Battery Voltage
  • Battery Remaining %
  • GPS accuracy
  • Throttle %
• Mode Control e.g.
  • Auto
  • Stabilize
  • Alt Hold
  • Land
  • RTL
  • Loiter
• Map View with Mission outline
• Mission Waypoint editor
  • includes waypoint parameter editing
• Configuration
  • Calibration for level
• Commonly used parameter editing
  • Tuning of common parameters

PLEASE NOTE: The app requires a Wi-Fi link on the drone or Wi-Fi Bridge to 915/433MHz Telemetry Radio. Details are here http://www.communistech.com/blog/support/

Compatibility: ArduPilot (Plane:Copter), ArDone 2.0 with Flight Control, and PX4 native stack (basic) (it's MAVLink 1.0 compatible, so other may work)

You can get the app from http://appstore.com/ for a special 1/2 price promo this weekend. More info on http://www.communistech.com (Sorry, my site seems offline at the moment, but should be back in the hour)

Happy Flying :-)

This is some footage shot with the second version of the thermal imaging camera which I tested earlier on (http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/testing-a-small-thermal-imaging-camera).

The second version of the camera features a better resolution, an OSD to adjust parameters such as brightness & gain and the possibility to show the picture in false-color.

The camera is very light and small - ideal for UAV applications.
I am planning to shoot some in-flight footage (mounted on my copter) during the next week.

Shot with the 15mm lens:

Technical Details:
Sensor:

Type: (ULIS) Un-cooled FPA micro-bolometer A-Si

Array Size (resolution): 640x480

Spectral Range: 8～14um

NETD: ≤80mk@25℃

Full Frame Rate: 50Hz (PAL)

Power consumption: @12V 200mA

Dimensions without lens:

62mm x 48mm x 48mm (LxWxH)

Weight: 180g

Clemson University / www.OspreyHD.com from Lee Dashiell | Osprey Production on Vimeo.

Not to long ago my father who is not what I would describe as technology savvy forwarded me a email that he had received from Clemson University we we both had attended Architectural School. I believe my father said something to the effect 'I think you will enjoy this'. After I watched it I was more than impressed and quite shocked of the channel the information was provided.

I quickly reached out to Lee at Osprey Production seeing that he was very close to our Digi-DNA shop in Charleston, SC. Currently we are developing a craft specifically to carry the Red Epic or Scarlett, and excited to get it in the air, so we can make more shots like the above. 

This article is part four in a series, describing some of the inner workings of an autopilot system - even though the description is specific for this particular system, a lot of principles are generic and can be used to describe a variety of auto pilot systems.

Today we take a look at the overall system and some initial flight testing.

Current system overview

To give you a better insight into the inner workings of the autopilot, I’ll throw in a little blog diagram of some of the building blocks of this autopilot system.

More blocks are bound to be added as I expand the system.

Coms - Handles all internal communication between modules as well as external communication ie. user input.

Logging and speech (talkback is a nice way to get crucial info without looking at a screen) is also handled by coms.

Telemetry - Handles input from sensors, gps, user input etc. It also handles communication back to the craft (guidance commands etc.)

Watchdog - monitors the whole system and warns if any anomalies occur during flight.

Rangeguard - makes sure that the drone does not get too far or too high during the flight.

State machine - handles the overall logic of the autopilot

Vessel - The craft type specific part (copter, fixed wing etc.) and the library of maneuvers that the craft is able to perform.

User input is currently handled by an external auto sequencer (XAS), which is programmed to do a series of commands at specific times. The XAS waits for the state machine to perform a preflight check, and when everything is ready, the XAS issues an auto-takeoff command. Further down the development line, app and chat integrations will be made to control the autopilot.

Flight testing

So it’s time to take the system for a spin in a closed loop test, were the autopilot actually gets to control the drone and not just tell a human how it would like the drone to fly. The idea is to do some simple stuff that exercise most of the system.

Especially the state machine, the sensor/telemetry system and maneuver systems are of interest to the first test, so I decided to configure the statemachine for a simple 1 waypoint maneuver, where the drone take off automatically, navigates to the one waypoint and does and autoland afterwards.

Auto takeoff utilizes the gyro/accelerometer to sense when the flying wing is thrown, and will upon this, start the engine and begin to climb to approx. 10 meters altitude, after which it finishes the auto takeoff maneuver.

Waypoint navigation uses the GPS and magnetometer to determine heading and distance to the waypoint.

Auto land uses the altimeter and gyros to determine when to cut off the engine and when the craft is actually down.

Approximately 30 parameters are recorded and logged for offline evaluation (height, gyro/accel output etc.). All this data is analysed through charts etc., to determine the how's and why's of each test. 

Safety

Because we now start to fly the system in a closed loop, where the autopilot actually gets to control engine and servos, we need a safety arrangement that makes sure that we can resume control if something goes fishy. The IMU residing on the drone has therefore been programmed to stop listening for autopilot commands if it receives a hard right input from a normal RC transmitter. Once it has received a hard right, it will no longer process any information from the autopilot and the drone (fixed wing) will be flying 100% by the input of the RC transmitter and will thus act like a normal RC controlled airplane.

Furthermore, a automated checkout procedure built into the state machine makes sure to measure radio connection quality, sensor flux, gps lock etc, before allowing the plane to leave the ground.

Lastly, the autopilot features speech of important parameters, warnings etc,. which is a great help, since you don't have to look at a screen while the plane is in the air.

Results

As mentioned, the main objectives are to exercise and analyse the backbone systems, such as the state machine, telemetry system and maneuvers that subscribe to data from sensors and use them during their operation.

Auto take off worked quite good, each throw was correctly detected and a suitable delay before turning the motor on was present, to allow the throwing hand to get out of the way. Once the height of 10 meters were achieved, the state machine switched to waypoint navigation. I noticed that the plane took some shallow turns, while climbing which suggests that a heading hold functionality would probably be a good thing. This could be implemented by detecting the heading of the launching throw, and then try to keep the plane on that path during the climb.

Auto land was dead simple, worked simply by setting throttle low, wait until being 2 meters above ground and then turn the engine off altogether. This seemed to work perfectly, although a heading hold would probably be beneficial here to.

The interesting part was the waypoint navigation. I thought it fun to try to do a very simple algorithm to determine if the plane should turn left, right or head straight to reach the waypoint. I kind of new from the start that it probably required a PID loop, but I wanted to see what would happen if I used a simple "if I'm left of the waypoint turn right with a fixed value" kind of logic.

The chart below shows the almost endless circles the plane took to finally reach the waypoint. It seemed like a lot of overshooting took place and the plane generally flew eagle style, with a lot of huge turns, slowly getting nearer the waypoint - The journey took 32 seconds - not good :-)

The above graphic just shows why PID control was invented. In short, a PID controller regulates a system to achieve an optimum counting in past deviations, current deviation and future predicted deviations. So instead of the simple compare based logic, the waypoint navigation was "upgraded" with a PID loop that took the current heading and desired heading as input and outputted a correction to the roll of the plane. After some tuning while running some previously recorded flight data, it was time to repeat the test with PID control. The chart below shows how the plane (once the autopilot went into navigation mode) makes a steep turn and heads quite straight for the waypoint (the wind was quite strong at the time). The journey this time took roughly 5 seconds.

The test was repeated several times with the same result, so hurray for PID control! Most autopilots use PID to control height, roll etc., so I'm not breaking new ground here, but the two images nicely shows the effect of an efficient PID controller.

Next steps

It's certainly doable to separate the autopilot from the actual aircraft (which made developing and onsite tweaking so much easier) and basic autopilot features have been achieved. There are a lot of practical limitations in the separation, but also solutions to most. A lot have been learned from the small plane (designated UTV-3 - Universal Test Vehicle) and as the flying season is winding down it's time to start building a new and larger version which will facilitate a host of sensors and allow further testing of ie: the ALF system as well as letting one drone control other drones in a coordinated effort. The next plane will be based on the Phantom FX61 airframe which is a bigger brother of the UTV-3.

On Oct 10th,   Tecscorp™ and FIA Foundation announced that they have teamed up to offer the firsts two Online course on design, development and deploy of Drones, that students can earn exclusively through the  Online Course delivery format and and completely in Spanish.

 “The success of our first offering on Drones proved there is a real value and robust appetite to offer this online course to a broad span of industry players once again. And based on feedback received from the first offering, we have integrated several enhancements into the new version,” said Ronald Messino, CEO of Tecscorp™.

The twelve-week online course, aimed at technical professionals and executives, tackles state-of-the-art topics in Drones — Automatics pilots, logistic, and processing to analytics and visualization — and also addresses a range of real-world applications.Tecscorp is unique among enterprises in that it is offering its online courses on more than one platform and on Spanish. Each has its own distinct features and capabilities, among them video lectures, discussion forums, peer assessment, problem sets, simulations and team projects.

Dear Friend ,

after a lot of month to work and 1 year of experience on VR Gimbal firmware now we are at release 1.20 I'm very happy to present a new revision of product. 

VR micro Gimbal 4.0

In the video you can see the early preview of new product . VR micro Gimbal 4 derived from Brain 5 platform , it's based on Nuttx 7 O.S. support SD card for real time data logging and Mavlink protocol for direct integration with our advanced Flight Control VR Brain 5  and VR micro Brain 5 .

We aere working with other member to Dronecode foundation to try to define a standard for gimbal managment based on mavlink protocol .

We already implement a Mission Planner plugin for direct control the gimbal . Now we are discuss in dev team about the development of mavlink packet manager put over the nuttx os that can re direct mavlink traffic to correct device when it recived from ground station of from the specific application .  

The new oem product will be available in the next month for beta tester and oem for more information send a mail to info@virtualrobotix.com 

original blog post here : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/profiles/blogs/new-vr-gimbal-4-is-coming-new-hardware-design-and-a-lot-of-new-fe

Best

Roberto  

European Union is doing a questionnaire about the use of "drones".

More information here: http://ec.europa.eu/transport/modes/air/consultations/2014-civil-drones_en.htm

Consultation period: 14/08/2014 – 24/10/2014 - END TOMORROW

Background

Aviation technologies continue to evolve and to offer ever more opportunities to deliver services to citizens and to contribute to creating jobs and growth. At the same time, the growing use of new technologies deserves public debate and often requires appropriate intervention of the regulator in order to protect essential public interest. This is the case for remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), commonly known as drones. Such unmanned aircraft have the potential to support in the coming years a wide development of civil applications.

In Europe, RPAS are already being used for aerial photography but also for safety inspections of infrastructure, such as rail tracks, dams, bridges or power grids. National authorities are using them in disaster relief, e.g. to overfly flooded areas or to support firefighting. On other continents RPAS activities already support also precision farming through more effective and timely application of fertilizers or pesticides.

The extensive range of potential applications of these aircraft systems raises issues about their impact on the safety and security of airspace users and people on the ground as well as on citizen's privacy and the use of private data.

The European Commission intends to work on an initiative to regulate appropriately the development and use of RPAS within the context of the single aviation market, which is by its very nature already international. The initiative could involve the introduction of European rules to guarantee high levels of aviation safety and security, citizens' privacy and personal data protection. The challenge will be to strike the right balance between two objectives: to create space and freedom necessary for development of this new industry, often from small start-up companies, and to ensure that this development does not compromise the essential rights and interests of the EU citizens in terms of safety, security or privacy.

The context of the consultation is explained in more detail in Communication "A new era for aviation Opening the aviation market to the civil use of remotely piloted aircraft systems in a safe and sustainable manner " [COM(2014)207] and on http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/sectors/aerospace/uas/index_en.htm 

Aim of this questionnaire

This online consultation asks for your informed opinions and suggestions to help identify what are the gains that could be brought by the use of RPAS and what are the concerns that would need to be addressed by EU public intervention.

The questionnaire is structured as follows:

1. Respondent's profile
2. Expected market development
3. Problems to be addressed
4. Problem causes
5. Policy objectives
6. Policy options and measures
7. Impacts of policy options
8. Other questions

The results of this consultation will feed into the Commission impact assessment which will accompany a possible policy initiative on RPAS.

The questionnaire concerns the civil use of drones for commercial activity. The use for military purposes is not covered by this survey. The term “RPAS” is used throughout the questionnaire referring to Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems. The survey does not cover fully automated aircraft, which are still at an early stage of development.

Target group

Citizens, companies, public authorities, academia, associations and other stakeholders who have an interest in the issue of EU aviation safety, development of new technologies and improving the efficiency of the aviation sector.

From IEEE Spectrum:

Until recently, a defining characteristic of robots has been their rigid mechanical nature. Most of them are made up of hard structural elements, motors and actuators, electronics, sensors, and batteries, none of which are compliant. The future, though, promises to be softer, and we’ve seen lots of different robots that are either partially or completely soft. Soft robots have the potential to be much more adaptable, portable, and durable than rigid robots do, so ideally you’d want them for field applications where there might be a lot of crashing involved. Like UAVs. That would be a good idea, wouldn’t it?

Landing is hard for UAVs. It’s hard for the winged variety especially, since they can’t zero out their horizontal velocity before they hit the ground. Small UAVs can be made out of foam, with mostly integrated components, but they’ve still got fragile external bits that are vulnerable to damage. Namely, the elevons that the wings use for pitch and roll control. The Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL has developed a UAV that uses dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) as elevons: it can fly perfectly well, but the actuators are so compliant that you can literally bend them in half:

Here’s what the researchers have to say about the approach:

We have flown the MAV numerous times and found the DEA actuators allow for excellent controllability of the aircraft, as well as being very resistant to harsh handling.

In case you missed the brief “let’s bend this actuator completely in half” clip in the video, here’s a picture of the entire actuator being bent completely in half:

One advantage of this actuator is the near imperviousness it confers to theaircraft thanks to its inherent softness and stretchability. Or at least, to the elevons. What’s potentially more exciting (I think) is the potential to make an aircraft that can be folded up and stuffed into a bag, or even into a pocket, and then pulled out and tossed into the air whenever you need it.

DEAs aren’t a new thing, even if this particular implementation is a novel one. EPFL has also adapted them for other robotic applications, like this adorable little gripper:

“A Foldable Antagonistic Actuator,” by Jun Shintake, Samuel Rosset, Bryan Schubert, Dario Floreano, and Herbert Shea from EPFL, will be published in a forthcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics.

[ EPFL ]

A drone for everyone? It's about time.

Anura Pocket Drone is currently on KickStarter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1364595768/anura-the-beginning-of-the-drone-era-for-the-masse

-3dr Pixhawk- Page Link

Each time I integrate the pixhawk into a platform I am impressed with the ease and prowess to which it performs. Working with it often I had put together a single page for all of the hardware information, and used it as a cheat sheet often. With the recent addition of sales pages to our site I felt it made sense to provide what I was using as my notes to all who we work with and integrate this wonderful flight controller.

If there are suggestions on how on additional information that should be included please let me know as I welcome the input.

Vibration is the bane of multirotors, and needed something that I could produce very inexpensively in small quantities for quadcopter builds and other robotic applications. This is what I came up with that I could cut on demand on the waterjet.

I have used zip ties, nylon screws and traditional bolts with nylock nuts to secure them in a frame, and were very impressed with the operation, if you want a set to try please let me know and I will cut a few on the next production run.  

Hello, I decided to make a guide for people who wish to make a neat budget wireless fpv monitor. I figure that it costs less than half the amount to make your own than to buy an off the shelf monitor. And besides, it is fun to hack and be creative. You also learn some valuable skills.

Here we see the finished product:

To merge the RC305 & Monitor we have to open the back case and make some wiring adjustments and cut some holes using a dremmel tool.

As you can see, the wiring diagram for the monitor is quite simple. It allows us to merge the power wires of the RC305 & monitor, and also to connect the RC305 video out to one of the monitor's inputs.

We can see that once the RC305 board has been taken out of it's casing, it fits neatly inside the monitor with a single sticky pad to fix it.

We can add a small latching switch on the side and even add a headphone jack to allow us to better judge motor power when flying far away.

Adding a cheap mini DVR recorder is the next step to achieving a neat wireless monitor setup. We have to extend the back casing for this thing to fit inside though.

The finished product is neat and tidy. I also have plans for further advancement such as a touchscreen and droidplanner on the screen's video2 channel allowing us to switch between video screen and droidplanner screen. It is quite cheap to implement.

The How-to tutorial is here: http://dalybulge.blogspot.co.uk/

I will be adding more to this in the near future so please check again in a week or so.

Thanks and happy flying :)

It's been quiet on my front, but that was because I was redesigning ESC's (for multirotors and AP's).

Most of the ESC's for multirotor use the SimonK firmware on a relatively simple Atmel microcontroller. There's a single control wire running from the autopilot to the ESC, which is a signal proportionally dictates how long the mosfets are left open and as such command the torque on the motors.

And that's pretty much all there is to an ESC... No signal/wire coming back to tell the autopilot how that particular motor is doing or what the rpm or current is, it's just a "command wire". That sounds a bit antiquated for 2014.

So this picture is of an ESC dev board I first started on, here using the Allegro A4960 chip for simplicity. Shipping to Brazil takes time, so before it arrived the design already morphed into something new, so that's why the board looks unused. Both the MCU and driver chip changed on the newest development board version and I introduced testing points for oscilloscope readings; this project is about to get serious!

What are the features that I think an ESC for a modern multirotor should have?

1. Send the rpm back to the AP; for logging. I see people posting logs to request help figuring out what went wrong, but the log only states the "pwm out" for each motor, which is in no way a guarantee that the motor actually did that. So we need some feedback that states what the motor was actually doing, not what it was commanded to do.
2. Overload detection; the ESC's know what the current is and warn for overload situations.
3. Current & velocity control; neither current nor rpm is actively controlled as a proportional measure to the input PWM signal. So the control loop for the AP spans the IMU, motors, ESC and props, which is a large loop with lots of variables. This ESC will run one or two 'inner loops' and become responsible for achieving either torque or lift and run at a much higher frequency than 500Hz. What you get is that some variables no longer impact the control loop of the AP directly, which should make the vehicle more stable and likely more responsive.
4. Field Oriented Control; The flyback diodes next to mosfets typically burn energy in trapezoidal drive implementations, which  increases the heat on those mosfets. This happens because the mosfets close suddenly. The motor coil wants to resist that change, so you have a current that has nowhere to go except through that diode. In sinusoidal control, there's always one mosfet open for any coil, so the current always has somewhere to go, which means the flyback diodes won't get used, so you don't lose the heat.
5. FOC; better efficiency, because the current is always perpendicular to the magnetic field. This may come at the cost of max. torque (related to motor inductance and then only about 5%).
6. FOC; lower torque ripple (1/2-1/3) vs. trapezoidal drive, so hopefully less vibrations, less whistling.
7. Send current readings back to the AP; another opportunity for precisely logging what goes on near the motors. This could be helpful to detect ESC/motor/prop health (bad bearings, prop drag, etc)
8. Configuration; the AP can reconfigure ESC's prior to flight or when in maintenance to tune it for a specific motor.
9. Motor monitoring; if the motor stopped, shorted or the mosfets misbehaved, the ESC can shut down immediately and advise the AP. The AP can then take additional action.
10. Opportunities for automated ESC tuning specific to the motor/prop in use.

The way I see this ESC make a difference is when abnormal situations occur. The current AP's cannot be informed of failure, so it would simply send a signal to "run faster", which, guaranteed, has a disastrous effect to mosfet or motor and could therefore worsen the situation. Soon as the AP is informed something is wrong, it could sound an alarm, activate a chute, disable the counter motor... you suddenly have options!

To spur innovation in this area, I'm considering to setup a kickstarter and actually manufacture around 1.000 or so at a professional PCB house. Aren't these features indispensable for an ESC made in 2014? Would you back it?

As we are rapidly approaching the official release of the Albatross line of aircraft, we thought there would be no better way of saying thank you than by giving away a free airframe to someone in the community. As such we have decided a design contest is in order for the best paint scheme, with the winning designer receiving a free airframe incorporating his/her design.

We'll do our best to get the livery as an added color scheme option but thought this would be a good way to engage the community as we get ready for the release and getting this aircraft into your hands.

The contest is open as of this posting and will finish on November 10th. The designs must be possible from a production and manufacturing perspective (painting/vinyl). There must be an emphasis on orientation and visibility (i.e., contrasting colors), meanwhile maintaining an appealing and good looking aircraft. In that, we are excited and can't wait to see what you all come up with and to get the airframes out to you.



** We are looking for a color scheme that is highly visible, and good with orientation. Conventional aircraft paintjobs are preferred, but we will consider everything. We will accept ANY format. We encourage every design, no matter your artistic ability! If you need to print out the templates, color with crayon, and email us a picture, we don't mind, after all it is the design that counts! So send us your Illustrator, PNG, BMP, JPEG, MS Paint, or even hand drawn design, we will gladly take it into consideration! Ideas can either be emailed to us via the email provided below, they can be uploaded to this blog, or any other contest related posting we have made on other websites.**

Let the designs begin, we look forward to seeing them!

The Applied Aero Team

Previous Links:
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/exciting-news-from-the-applied-aeronautics-team

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/applied-aeronautics-and-the-albatross-uas

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/introducing-the-albatross-uav-project

http://appliedaeronautics.com/

Email:
Info@appliedaeronautics.com

Templates:

From the Guardian: "Currently on display at the Science Museum, London, is a 3D-printing drone created by Dr Mirko Kovac from Imperial College London that can extrude a foam material while on the wing."

Chris Courtois has been working the trials on the Condore spaceplane project with Team Prometheus for several years now. After all his wonderful work we are gaining experience needed to proceed ahead.

  In conjunction Jetmanhuss at VskyLabs has been developing the model for X-Plane allowing us to try different configurations and develop the model faster.

 Stewart and I have been working on mission control and tracking as well as the cold gas system to give the spaceplane stability in the stratosphere and beyond.

 Construction of the X12A a slightly larger all aluminum version of the X11F is about to begin.