Blogs

The PX4 team at ETH is a finalist for the IROS 2012 Best Paper award for this work, which uses the PX4 and the forthcoming PX4Flow optical flow board (coming soon from 3D Robotics) to do this:

We describe our autonomous vision-based quadrotor MAV system which maps and explores unknown environments. All algorithms necessary for autonomous mapping and exploration run on-board the MAV. Using a front-looking stereo camera as the main exteroceptive sensor, our quadrotor achieves these capabilities with both the Vector Field Histogram+ (VFH+) algorithm for local navigation, and the frontier-based exploration algorithm. In addition, we implement the Bug algorithm for autonomous wall-following which could optionally be selected as the substitute exploration algorithm in sparse environments where the frontier-based exploration under-performs.

We incrementally build a 3D global occupancy map on-board the MAV. The map is used by the VFH+ and frontier-based exploration in dense environments, and the Bug algorithm for wall-following in sparse environments. During the exploration phase, images from the front-looking camera are transmitted over Wi-Fi to the ground station. These images are input to a large-scale visual SLAM process running off-board on the ground station. SLAM is carried out with pose-graph optimization and loop closure detection using a vocabulary tree. We improve the robustness of the pose estimation by fusing optical flow and visual odometry. Optical flow data is provided by a customized downward-looking camera integrated with a microcontroller while visual odometry measurements are derived from the front-looking stereo camera. We verify our approaches with experimental results.

Here's the team and their birds. Huge and well-deserved congratulation!

Hi All, my name is Peter Spero, I am an musician and composer from Chicago.  I would like to create original musical scores for pilots who are capturing media from their UAVs.  You can check out some of my music at http://www.SperoMusic.com.  Much of the music on this site are my POP creations but I can also go way to the HipHop and Electronica side.  Thanks All!!!  There's no cost involved for now so please let me know if you are interested.  

Peter@SperoMusic.com

We won't be able to begin the (long) process of uploading the photos and imagery of CanberraUAV until we get back home, but I've uploaded a few of the "best of" photos taken from our UAV inflight:

(Flying over Joe)

(Passing over the Range Official's tent)

More images can be found on the CanberraUAV Flickr Group.

This flying wing has been around for a while, but now it is also available from Hobbyking. The X8 is made from EPO and with spars in the wing and canopy, this aircraft is virtually indestructable. With a wingspan of 2120mm (about 83.5 inch) this wing is capable of carrying some pretty nice gear for FPV or UAV's. It should be able to carry 1-1.5kg in extra weight. There is a camera mount in the nose and a forward oblique mount for GoPro camera's.

Even though this plane is big, it is easy to transport it. Both the wing panels and the vertical stabilisers are bolt on. The canopy is hold on by magnets. There is a spar molded into each wing panel.

To complete this aircraft, the following items are suggested:

• 400 - 800 watt motor (depending on your AUW)
• Propellor: 12x6 - 13x8 (foldable?)
• Battery, depending on motor size: 4S/3000mAh - 6S/5000mAh
• Speed controller: 40 - 70 Amps

Available from Hobbyking now for US$ 164.95: http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__27132__Skywalker_X_8_FPV_UAV_Flying_Wing_2120mm.html&aff=5361

Taking my TBS DISCOVERY for a long range flight across my backyard alpine wonderland. How do you manage extreme long range with quadrotors? With some careful pre-flight planning and a battery-swap-team on the mountain!

As some of you might remember, I hit a tree on my first flight and broke a wing.

Thanks to Gorilla Glue and some carbon fiber reinforcements the Bixler is up and running. I put 3 small carbon rods to reinforce the wing.

After some flights I decided it's time to attach a GoPro to it.

I have this cheap mount from HobbyKing but I didn't want to mount my camera to it permanently so I used helmet strap provided with the camera. Works great!

And here is some footage from the flight together with other plane flying around.

For sure it feels much heavier with the camera and flight time on 2200mAh is not as great as I thought. Of course I could use less thrust and fly more delicate with more gliding but anyway it's a great fun.

I'm waiting for the time to try FPV - but that is not gonna happen in this year for sure.

I saw a feature about Mercedes-Benz collision avoidance vision systems research on the Telly here in Germany where I am at the moment. 

This particular project uses two cameras to create stereo vision.  Comparing the two images is used to detect pixels that represent motion that could be hazardous to the vehicles current path.

Unfortunately, the clip above that I found on youtube doesn't have any explanatory voice-over, but appears to be the press-release footage.  Still, if you have enough patience to watch the video, keep an eye out for the display inside the car which shows the calculated threat motion vectors  

More about this, I do not know, but I thought it would be interesting for those looking at see-and-avoid systems for UAVs and the like

edit: just found this addional footage which shows the developer Uwe Franke describing the system in a little more detail - German and English sections follow each other

another little bit from Dr Stefan Gehring

We made it! We are in the top ten for the Jumpstart Biz Plan Awards sponsored by the Denver Economic Development Office. Let us know if you will be in Denver for Startup Week Oct. 22nd - 27th. @dronemapper

DroneMapper has just been notified by the city of Denver, Colorado that is has been selected as a top-10 finalist in a business competition called "JumpStart, Biz 2012". The competition looks for innovative business ideas that can contribute to the growth and health of Denver, CO. 150 applicants submitted their ideas during the first phase. The second phase - more in depth evaluation of business plans occurs for the next 2-3 weeks with the finalist announced in late October. First prize is $50,000, one year of office space in Denver, CO, and business mentoring. We look forward to attending the JumpStart Biz Plan Awards events and Startup Week Denver. For more information please visit the Denver OED website at the following link: http://www.denvergov.org/oed/DenverOfficeofEconomicDevelopment/BusinessServices/JumpStartBizPlanAwards/tabid/443335/Default.aspx

From Hackaday:

The biggest issue with sending expensive electronics into near space is trying to recover them. [Lhiggs] set out to solve this issue with his Senior project for a Mechanical Engineering degree. He figured that a payload dropped from 100,000 feet should be able to glide its way back to some predefined coordinates. Here you can see one of the tests, where the payload is guiding its descent using a parafoil.

Directional control is possible with a parafoil simply by shifting weight between the two supporting ropes. In this case [Lhiggs] designed the payload to hang from a pair of servo-motor-actuated arms. Since the payload already carries altitude and position hardware (such as a GPS, electronic compass, and altimeter) it’s just a matter of waiting for the target height before separating from the weather balloon, then using the servos to navigate to the landing zone.

Unfortunately the project was never fully completed. But you can see that he got pretty far. There is test footage embedded after the break showing the device being dropped from a plane.

HK has just released some parts specifically for quad or other multi-rotor use.

Interesting features:

• ESCs support high refresh rate out of the box.
• Advertised as being ATMEL based and firmware upgradable.
• Overload protection... detects jammed propellor and will shut dow
• System is being pitched as "solder free".  All wires come with connectors, and compatible extension/breakout cables are part of the system.

Another interesting point that I didn't think of is that their ESC programmer is jumper style instead of pushbutton style. This makes it easy to identically configure multiple ESCs to the same setting without a lot of button pushing, and presumably with much smaller chance of getting one out of sync.

The YT page has links to everything:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3kXtYGOCq0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fejOaW2k7Mc

This is probably basic/simple stuff, but here's a quick (raw) video of a fully autonomous wheeled take off in a Senior Telemaster.  The basic strategy used so far is to steer with the rudder to hold heading error to zero.  Then when airborne, use a small amount of gentle bank to steer the heading error to zero.  My roll gains could be better, but they finished the day much improved over the start (and hopefully will continue to improve as I have a chance to review the flight data.)  There is some lateral drift as you can see, but probably on par with the performance of an "average" RC pilot, and on this day there was some moderate cross wind component to deal with. 

The autopilot system we are developing uses the APM2 for sensors and then a gumstix overo for all the heavy lifting and computation.  I have a series of blog postings starting here that show a bit more about the system.

http://gallinazo.flightgear.org/uas/ardupilot/hacking-the-apm2-part-1-introduction/

At Maker Faire NYC this weekend, Arduino's Massimo Banzi announced that the long-awaited ARM-based Arduino, called the DUE, would be out in November.

Engadget reports:

The Due is roughly the size of the Mega 2560, but swaps the 16MHz, 8-bit processor found in your standard issue Arduino for a 96MHz Cortex-M3 [Corection: it's 84MHz by default but can be overclocked to 96]. Predictably, the Due is a much more capable development platform, and could easily replace multiple AVR-based Arduinos in products like DIY Drones' UAVs. The Due isn't expected ship till at least November in large quantities, but preview boards are currently being handed out to select developers.

I was there and spent a lot of time with the Arduino team discussing the latest details, including debugger and USB interfaces. We've been working with them for a year on this, and some of the APM team helped with the Due software. Right now the APM team is focused on the PX4 board and bringing ArduCopter and ArduPlane to that ASAP, but that ARM-based and RTOS-based code will also be the foundation of a future Due-based APM board. 

Given the delays in Due, we're going to wait until it's out and the community can spend some time with it before pushing out a new APM board; the transition to ARM is not trivial for Arduino, and we've already got a great ARM platform with PX4. But we are working closely with the Arduino team and are committed to Arduino as one of our platforms for the future. It's less about the hardware power and more about the ease-of-use of the programming toolchain and the inclusivity of the community, and Arduino has served us very well on that.

A full video of the Arduino/AVR presentation at Maker Faire is here:

Here are the technical specs, from this PDF:

Hi all,

I just want to share with the DIYdrones community my project GuerrillaDrone. It's a Y6 copter with a onboard beamer for video projections in the public space.

As you know in Spain we have a strong crisis with a massive injection of money to the banks meanwhile thousands of people are evicted frome their houses, so the helicopter beam activist messages against the banks and corruption of politics in Spain.

You can read more info about the project here:
http://guerrilladrone.feenelcaos.org/blog/

Russian companies FilmAndFly & 66site.ru produced two Aerial 360 panoramas of Yekaterinburg from hexacopter.

View from the Iset river to the sports palace on north riverside, the drama theatre and state government house on the south riverside.
(Click on the photo to view)

View to incomplete since 1990s TV Tower and to the city circus.
(Click on the photo to view)

For this panos FilmAndFly used 3Axis camera gimbal(+controller) by Russian robotics company MishinMachines:

About this project will be published soon.

Yep you read it right, historic day for sUAS everywhere. Oh except in America ;-) 

French Civil Aviation Authority, the DGAC, awarded Delair-Tech the first authorisation ever issued to a UAS company in France, for a civil UAS to fly over 100 km in French airspace.

Delair-Tech is based in Toulouse and specialised in the design and manufacturing of long endurance mini-UAS.

Well done Delair-Tech

http://www.suasnews.com/2012/10/19001/flights-of-upto-100km-permitted-by-french-aviation-authorities/

This is a big step towards the legal use of drones I believe. I never heard of this company but it seems they've been working hard with a nice focus. Nice design too with the small exchangeable 'sensor' bay. More info on the certification can be fount at http://www.uasvision.com/2012/10/03/french-civil-aviation-authority-awards-first-uas-authorisation-to-fly-over-100km-in-civil-airspace/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=0c16e3ea51-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN 

Congrats to Tridge and the CanberraUAV team for winning the 2012 Outback Challenge! The official results have just been posted:

Search & Rescue competition - FINAL SCORES In the end Canberra UAV were clear winners, finding Joe and making it... http://fb.me/1FWDJ5f81

Tridge and CanberraUAV team are core ArduPlane developers and the UAV is flown by an APM 2 autopilot. So proud of Tridge and the team! No doubt a full report of how it went will be coming soon.

[UPDATE: The ultimate goal of the Outback Challenge is to drop a water bottle near Outback Joe (the dummy on the ground in the picture above), and no team accomplished that this year (the CanberraUAV bottle got stuck). So although CanberraUAV won easily on points this year, the ultimate challenge still remains for future competitions.] 

My new book launches today! You can get it here (hardcover or Kindle)

If you liked The Long Tail, my first book, you'll love this. It's about what's happening as the Web's innovation model extends to the real world of physical goods. From 3D printing to Kickstarter, the industrialization of the Maker Movement could do for manufacturing what the Web did for content--an explosion of choice, creativity and entrepreneurship.

We've seen what what can happen when regular people get access to extraordinary tools, first with the PC and then with the Web. Now it's manufacturing's turn--the third wave of the digital revolution.

This is my most personal book. It starts with the story of my grandfather, the inventor of the automatic sprinkler system, and my own experience building a Maker community (DIY Drones) and then a company (3D Robotics). But it also tells the stories of scores of other Makers who are using everything from desktop fabrication tools to "cloud manufacturing" to create new products and markets -- the Long Tail of Stuff.

I'm really excited about this movement. And I'm really proud of this book. I think you'll like it ;-)

Sunset flight made possible by APM 1.4 on my trusty Skywalker.

Hi all, here is what you can expect from that plateforme with 10 amp ESC and KDA 20/26