Blogs

Story By:TJ McCue of Forbes

Amazon’s recent announcement around drone delivery captured the world’s attention. It is a creative idea. But, as Chris Anderson, founder of 3D Robotics (and also the creative mind that has propelled Wired,TED, DIY Drones, and other innovations to success), said about the idea before Amazon even suggested it: “It’s incredibly stupid.”

Now to be clear, I’m a huge fan of Amazon and I would not bet against Mr. Bezos. I know someone who did and still kicks himself for not investing in the company. While I believe they are seriously pursuing it, I don’t believe it will happen in the near term. I would rather follow Chris Anderson into niche markets that need and can use drones today (besides the military) like cropdusting for farming. You can read about his start in drones at Wired.

To read the full story visit:http://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2013/12/31/nevermind-amazon-prime-drones-google-has-future-delivery-vehicle-with-uber/

Posted on behalf of Victorian UAS Training.

Victorian UAS Training -Commercial partners _____________________________________

Victorian UAS Training is proud to announce that after months of hard work we now ready to introduce ourselves to the industry.

The UAV industry in Australia suffers from a chronic shortage of training facilities; this means that people who want to get into the industry can’t and those that are already operating in the industry have only a small pool of potential clients.

With some of the best UAV regulations in the world there is infinite scope for the market to grow and to become a world leader in UAS technology.

This is where we hope to help by providing training to those who want to get into the industry and link them to appropriate Australian made and certified UAS technology that meets and exceeds the standards set out by CASA. This will help grow the industry by creating more customers for developers and providing them with a training solution for their current clients. We will also be able to help UAV developers produce CASA ready aircraft documentation for their platforms allowing them to give their clients a clear path through the certification process taking out all the guesswork.

Our CASA documentation is now ready to submit and we aim to be operational for training in February/March.

We are currently offering initial developer packages which feature exclusive use of our training and testing facility, a controller certificate for a member of staff and access to our referral network.

You can also reserve your spot in our courses and be one of the first to hold the new RPA level one certificate.

For more information on developer packages or to reserve your spot on one of our courses please visit: www.victorianuastraining.com.au  or email us at:info@victorianuastraining.com.au

Mathew Herbert

Director

Victorian UAS Training

GetGo is a regional gas station in my area. Knowing my interest in all things drone, a friend of mind shared this with me on social media. I thought it was worth sharing here. 

If I had to guess, I would have predicted that Parrot would announce an outdoors quadcopter with better camera than the AR.Drone to compete with the DJI Phantom Vision, but instead they went even further into the toy realm with a "MiniDrone" that has no camera at all. The Verge reports:

As the name suggests, it really is a smaller quadrocopter cut from the same cloth as the AR.Drone. You can hold it in the palm of your hand but it actually has quite a bit of power. We used it inside and it zipped across a room very quickly. Its four rotors spin with ferocity and sound like a swarm of bees attacking, but the MiniDrone keeps its balance and it surprisingly easy to control.

It's controlled just like the AR.Drone using an iPhone app. The makers say that they spent quite a bit of time to make sure that the drone would be stable and easy to use — particularly important since Parrot hopes kids will use the MiniDrone. In practice it seems their work has paid off: you can control the pitch and yaw using one thumb and altitude and rotation using another. You can also use the accelerometer in the iPhone to change the drone's direction. It may sound complicated, but the computer on board the drone makes it very difficult to spin out of control, and at any time you can release both thumbs and the drone will instantly return to a stable hover. It's so stable, in fact, that we were able to bounce off of walls and hit it in air without knocking it out of the skies.

By default the MiniDrone comes with large wheels, which primarily serve to let the toy roll around. They become particularly useful as a protective barrier around the rotors, allowing the drone to bounce around without getting destroyed.

On the tech side of things, Parrot's using Bluetooth 4.0 to communicate with the drone, and the company says that offers a maximum range in clear air of about 160 feet. We didn't have any issues with range during testing, but you may do well to be concerned about the battery life — the company promises 6-7 minutes on a full charge. At least it will be a very fun few minutes.

http://www.robotspodcast.com/podcast...episode142.mp3

Got around to listening to it out of curiosity.

http://www.bluerivert.com/

It's not necessarily quad copter, but tractor based. Did not know Calif*'s mane crop was lettuce or that it produced any vegetables at all, since there hasn't been any rain since 2012. Though quad copters harvesting lettuce is a highly dubious proposition, there's certainly money to be made from tractors.

That guy was rich. Listening to him complain about the lack of PhD's to design computer vision algorithms, you thought just stop being a dick & hire people who know how to design computer vision algorithms instead of insisting they have a PhD from Berkeley. Most of the discovering, inventing, engineering, living & dying in this town is done by makers & hackers working in garages. Yet another overstuffed taco salad supported by the federal reserve.

Your other thought was agriculture might actually become a big business as our generation believed 20 years ago. Unlike what we believed, the money is not going to biologists who study genetics, but to designers of robots & businessmen.

There are no jobs for biology majors who learned about robotics on their own, only for engineers who learned about biology on their own or businessmen who can track down farmers with bucks.

It's probably a supply & demand issue. Few people can pull off the engineering side & business side while everyone can do the biology part.

A huge aversion has emerged to the genetic engineering we thought would comprise most of the expansion in food supply. A lot of that is lack of knowledge about genetic engineering & movies, but whatever. For now, you can't use genetic engineering to feed Africa. That leaves using automation to expand the biological system we already have.

From The Verge:

In October, PETA launched the Air Angels program, a line of drones meant to let concerned citizens report illegal activity by hunters. Hunting groups pushed back and, as of January 1st, the program has been made illegal in Illinois with a law prohibiting "the use of drones to interfere with hunters or fishermen." The only problem: PETA isn't buying it.

According to Jared Goodman, PETA's director of animal law, Air Angels aren't about interference at all. "The intention is simply to monitor what hunters are actually doing," Goodman says, "and whether they're engaged in any illegal activity, such as drinking in possession of a firearm or illegally using spotlights or feedlures." If they spot any illegal activity, PETA members are advised to report it to a local game warden and not take any further action themselves. As a result, PETA is eager to challenge the new law, but even more eager to test out the project in states.

Hunting groups like The US Sportsman's Alliance, which has applauded the Illinois law, aren't so sure. "PETA's approach here was essentially just to get some press," says CEO Nick Pinizzotto. He says his members were incensed by the idea of the project, but he hasn't heard any instances of hunters actually being harassed by the drones. (Goodman, in his defense, says "dozens" of the Air Angels have been sold through PETA's website.)

Still, the legal issues are thorny enough to cause problems even without widespread hunter-watching programs. If the Illinois law is challenged, it's not clear hunters would be able to appeal on privacy grounds. "It's being done on public land in a nonresidential area," Goodman says. "There's no reasonable expectation of privacy there. Any other hunter who's on the same land could see the same thing." It might be more unnerving to be watched by a drone than a person, but the legal distinction is less clear, which presents regulators with real uncertainties as they look to draw up rules for the bots.

Even if the law isn't settled, Pinizzotto is sure public opinion is on the side of hunters. "I don't think Americans in general appreciate being spied on, whether it's hunting or anything else," he says. "People are really concerned about the idea of drones. If they can spy on me hunting, what else can they do?"

From Makezine:

This cool project was built by a Danish company, Valhalla Drone Solutions, a group of seven engineers from the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. It’s a Lego Mindstorms robot that automatically switches a quadrotor’s battery pack.

When the drone lands, it’s positioned by a belt, an assembly pops out, and the old battery is lowered out of the quadrotor. That battery is placed into a rotating disk that spins to position a fresh battery, which is then placed into the drone.

What is really cool, however, is that this is the prototype for an actual product Valhalla hopes to sell, which they call the Odin Platform. One role they envision the product filling is resupplying agricultural drones. Way cool!

[via The NXT Step]

So, I decided to build a micro-osd for my WLtoys V929 micro fpv quadcopter. It's still in progress, but if you are interested in this project and would like to add you inputs then please visit this page: http://benbojanglesosd.blogspot.co.uk/

You can learn how to build your own micro fpv here: http://dalybulge.blogspot.co.uk/

:)

This is my first public video with the new Pixhawk board revision 2.4 and for "par condicio" a new one with VR Brain, both install "APM Copter V3.1" code.
After intensive testing the stability of the system is impressive, with this release the APM Copter Developer Team has achieved equal result, if not superior, to the companies that produce closed systems like DJI.
We have so much still to be improved, a small italian team is studying now a new flight mode called "Hybrid Loiter" that allow you to fly more smoothly as "DJI Position Hold", same feeling of flying with "Alt-Hold" mode, just wish we could have something ready i'll post a video with the final result.
I often read of unwanted crash or fly-away, personally with the V3.x code i've hundreds hours of flight without ever having had a single crash, if the hardware is well-balanced/assembled, and the tuning is done as it should be "APM Copter" provides excellent stability and security.
My special thanks to the whole APM Copter Team for having opened the new year with this milestone release, and to 3DRobotics and Virtual Robotix Italia.

Enjoy your flying and fly safe!

Bests, Marco

Want to get behind something for a great KICK STARTER project that will make the world of drones leap forward on a whole new scale? Have a look at this. Been working on this, so to see how this plays out, is bloody exciting. I am in, are you?

Three men assemble a drone in Tianjin. (Photo/Xinhua)

http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20140101000071&cid=1103

Four people have been detained by police in Beijing for navigating an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) into the airspace of Beijing Capital International Airport, which caused delays for more than 10 passenger flights, reports the local Beijing News.

The drone was detected on Dec. 29 by the Civil Aviation Administration over the international airport at 11:00 am. The UAV was seen flying at 700 feet at a speed of more than 100 kilometers an hour.

Two civilian airplanes were forced to alter their flight courses to maneuver away from one another and the drone, while the local authority dispatched a helicopter to intercept the UAV.

Four people involved in the case have since been detained and charged with "endangering public security" and "seriously interrupting flight order."

Local police said the drone was modified from a model airplane to conduct surveying and mapping operations to the east of the airport. The investigation found that the four suspects were employees working for a local company, and they had failed to apply for approval to conduct such an operation, according to the Civilian Use of Drones Regulations.

"All unmanned aircraft are banned from entering the 15 kilometer range of airports and from flying higher than 100 meters on flight courses elsewhere," said Feng Chang, co-founder of the Beijing FlyCam, during an interview with the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post on Dec. 31

Not multirotor/ UAV use in the video, but this technology could eventually be applied into UAV applications. Let's see how long it takes for affordable electronics to be made available for enthusiast/ hobby use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqNC72fgetc

What a year this has been! We'd like to offer our thanks to 3D Robotics and everyone who contributed to the diydrones community. More information available on DroneSpeak.com. Happy New Year!

I'm very impressed by how my newly built Tarot t960 performed an autolanding in relatively strong winds with ArduCopter 3.1. I haven't spent so much time tuning the copter but the auto-landing was quite impressive. Landed back at the exact same spot where it took off. Winds were about 25km/h.

Thanks to the development team.

There's a huge amount to celebrate as we reflect on this community's accomplishments in 2013. Just as we did in 2012, we had record membership this year (we'll hit 50,000 members in a couple months), traffic (nearly 1.8 million pageviews a month) and engagement (hundreds of comments and blog/forums posts per day).  And the dev teams crushed it, helping making APM the leading open UAV platform and completing a successful transition to 32-bit platforms and an entirely new hardware line.

Here are just some of the achievements of the year. 

Software/Documentation Dev Teams

• Migration to 32-bit platforms...and beyond. Thanks to important foundational work by Pat Hickey on creating a "hardware abstraction layer" (HIL) that allows the APM software to be easily ported to any hardware, the APM dev teams migrated the Copter, Plane and Rover code to the ARM-based PX4 platform. This paved the way for the release of Pixhawk, our first consumer-oriented ARM-based autopilot. Next up: a range of powerful hardware platforms, from Linux/x86 to BeagleBone Black. 
• ArduCopter 3.x generation, led by Randy Mackay, with major advances in performance and reliability. New features include autotune (Leonard Hall), GPS glitch rejection, and fun new flight modes such as "Drift" (Jason Short). Release details in the project news feed here. 
• ArduPlane 2.7x generation, led by Andrew Tridgell, with major advances in reliability navigation, including the famous "L1" controller spearheaded by Brandon Jones. (details here)
• ArduRover 2.4x migration, led by Andrew Tridgell and Tom Coyle, which was a major rewrite to sync Rover up with the Copter and Plane codebase, ensuring that it has all the same advanced mission planning and performance features (details here)
• Migration of manual and forums to WordPress on ArduPilot.com. This was a huge project, with scores of contributors starting with Sandro Benigno and Max Levine and the 3DR IT team and then led by Gary McCray, Stefan Gofferje and Alex Paskulin from the 3DR Editorial Team.
• APM Planner 2.0. The new cross-platform GCS (Mac, Windows, Linux) for APM and Pixhawk, which merged the look-and-feel of Mission Planner with the flexible and powerful QGroundControl architecture (with built-in support for multiple vehicles/swarming and plug-ins). Led by Bill Bonney and Michael Carpenter, with many contributions from Lorenz Meier from the PX4 team at ETH. 
• Droidplanner/Andropilot/Droneshare. The first generation of mobile and cloud apps designed from the ground up for APM/MAVlink. Led by Kevin Hester (Andropilot and Droneshare) and Arthur Benemann (DroidPlanner). Look for a really cool and polished DroidPlanner 2.0 next week! (preview shown):
• Mission Planner 2.x. Last but very much not least is the remarkable Mission Planner by Michael Oborne, which added a host of new features and a layer of polish this year, as part of its extraordinary evolution into one of the most fully-features GCSs available. 

3D Robotics

• Pixhawk!
• Iris!
• New website!

• Big VC round!
• Migrated to new Tijuana factory:
• Opened Berkeley office:

Finally, a huge thanks to all the members, Moderators and developers who worked so hard in 2013 to make this our best year ever. This community has become something extraordinary, and every day I'm blown away by the ideas, insights, energy and creativity of the members here. Drones are hot!

Here's a hack that worked pretty well for me. Thought I'd share the how-to.

I leveraged some leftover GoPro parts to mount my tablet onto my radio:

I used the two sticker based helmet mounts (1 on RC Transmitter, 1 on tablet) and the "3 way pivot arm". I had to cut the tab holding the nut off of the 3 way pivot arm part to get it to work. No worries - it wasn't seeing any action anyway.

I mounted my XBee data-link radio on the back of the tablet with velcro. I need to find a shorter USB cable to eliminate the extra slack to clean it up a bit.

Mounting the sticky GoPro mount to a plastic protective Nexus 7 cover allows me to remove the tablet easily.

PROS:

The sticker based mounts seem to be holding pretty well. Time will tell if they hold.

The GoPro mounts allow customized positioning.

The 3-way pivot arm gets the tablet out of the way of the RC controls and closer to the face.

Using sticker based mounts does not require drilling into the RC transmitter.

CONS:

The GoPro joints tend to move a bit due to the weight of the tablet.

Going hands-off with the RC Transmitter hanging by a neck strap, the whole rig wants to do a back-dive, due to the top-heavy center of gravity.

I have only used it a few times with a Rover. I have not done any range tests to see if the rig or the XBee radio causes any interference with the RC Transmitter.

Click Here to View the CADDrones.com 3D Printing Services Page

What's up DiyDrones.com!?  I wanted to let you folks know I built a 3D Printing Services Page on CADDrones.com!  This page will be used for people to connect with companies and people who own 3D Printers that are offering 3D Printing Services to Hobby and/or Commercial markets.  If you ever need replacement parts built this will be a great place for you to be able to connect with people to have parts built.  Custom Designs and 3D Prints will be possible for people who don't own 3D Printers. The form to add your company to the official CADDrones 3D Printing Services List can be found on CADDrones and also below:

Click Here to see the CADDrones.com Beta Information!

(Please send me a Filled out Copy of this form by message on CADDrones or to my email at:JoshuaAllenJohnson@gmail.com to add your business or company to the Services List)

3D Printing Service Contact Form (Below):

DJI officially released 2.4G Bluetooth Datalink & iPAD Ground Station.  Nice simple interface, seems very intuitive.  Can't wait to see Droid Planner 2.0 :)

After some years of experimenting with copters and fixed wings there was a need for a flying system with flexible mounting options for different sensors, transmitters and other payloads. It is made of cheap materials, easy to get and easy to repair. The bars are made out of 15x15x1 mm aluminium, the rest is 3D printed on a Prusa Mendel in ABS. All parts are assembled with nylon screws, the parts are printed with the appropriate holes, pre drilled for precision and finally threads are cut in using a cordless screw driver which makes it a matter of seconds per hole.

The design is robust with straight edges so there will always be a place for some additional antenna, a cam or a sonic sensor. On it's back it has a small platform which will be a good place for some metallic baseplate if an additional antenna is to be mounted.

If there is a need, it will be easy to reduce materials to achieve less weight, right now it flies for about 8 minutes on a 4000 mAh LiPo pack. This battery pack can be inserted into the fuselage from the front, on the bottom side you will find a sliding mechanism which makes it easy to mount a cam or something else just by changing the component. If there is a need for a longer flight time, some additional battery can be attached as well.

The files are made with google sketchup, if you want to have them just let me know.

Thanks to all of you, Happy New Year,

Tom