Our head of manufacturing in Tijuana, Guillermo Romero, and his team: Elena Naranjo, Manuel Arriaga, Orlando Avendaño Gastelum, and Shiela Diaz have recently completed the introductory session of ISO9001:2008 certification. Quality management is an ongoing effort and something 3D Robotics strives for. We are proud of our products and want to insure they perform as promised -- quality manufacturing is a key ingredient to this goal.
By Heather Hetterick & Matt Reese
Just a few years ago, it would seem more like something out of a bad sci-fi film. But today, the possibility of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) floating over a farm taking pictures or video is a reality.
The unnerving whirring sound and ominous silhouette across the blue rural sky have triggered many opinions and possibilities for the agricultural community.
Rory Paul feels that UAVs, or drones, have many more positives than negatives. Paul is the owner of Volt Aerial Robotics in St. Louis and he sees tremendous potential for their use in agriculture.
“There are several applications we see developing. The simplest one is crop scouting. You could use a simple system like a helicopter or quad copter. The farmer can stand at the side of the field and get a bird’s eye view. There are huge advantages here because right now an agronomist can only see a small fraction of the field. If you see a problem, you get a picture of it and know exactly where it is,” he said. “The next application is mapping. You can use a fixed-wing UAV and you actually map the field creating an up-to- date digital map of the field. This allows the farmer to look at nutrient issues to develop an application plan and, technically, we could probably use precision spot spraying.”
In the distant future, he believes we could see other applications including pollination and population counts.
http://ocj.com/2013/05/drones-can-be-positive-and-negative-for-the-ag-industry/
An interesting chat with Wayne, Kickstarter star and all round good egg. Its not easy bringing a new product to market, especially one that pushes the current envelope a little further. In this case time aloft, Wayne has already flown for two hours and confidently expects the platform to be able to make three.
From the successful KickStarter bid:-
A high performance remote control airplane for first person view (FPV) flying and the Umanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) hobbyist. Designed from the ground up to have an enclosed pan and tilt camera mounted in the nose for a completely unencumbered point of view. All wrapped up in a super slick fuselage with high aspect ratio wings, a high efficiency airfoil and room to swing up to a 12 inch propeller.
The all important specs:
In case you are wary of having drones, such as RC helicopters, quadrotors…, flying around your house and invading your privacy, DroneShield can help you detect consumers’ drones by using a Raspberry Pi, a microphone and FFTW library, a C library for computing the discrete Fourier transform.
The device will capture the audio with the microphone, analyze the noise spectrum of the drone flying around, and search for an entry in a signature database, and if a match is found the device will then send an email or SMS to inform you of the “invader”.
Read more: full article here
electronic countermeasures are coming :)
Some terrific art installation projects that use quadcopters carrying mirrors to reflect light [1:12]
I wanted to share with you a board that a couple of us have been working on for the last few months. We put it together to be an easy-to-access ARM Cortex-M4F flight controller. We also got a little frustrated with the STM peripherals library, so we've been building out a c++ object peripherals library that's open source with a nice, flexible expat license. Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions!
Library: https://github.com/ashima/embedded-STM32F-lib
Board info (and lots of other random stuff): http://ashimadevices.com
Here's some info on the board. In the image, above, there are two prototypes we made, top has a XBee and the programmer / power board attached. The bottom has the two boards separated and the XBee removed.
Physical Specs:
main board - 64mm x 35mm; 15g; 3.3v in (5v tolerant I/O)
programmer / power board - 27 mm x 35 mm; 7g; 6-20v in / 3.3v and 5v out
Processor: 168 MHz 32-bit Cortex-M4F (FPU); 1Mb Flash; 192K SRAM; 5v tolerant I/O; 14 timers; CRC and RNG units; 96 bit unique ID; RTC calendar; I2C, SPI, USART I/O; USB; 3 ADC, 1 DAC
IMU: MPU 9150 - board centered with colocated mag, gyro and accel; BMP180 pressure (MS5611 ready, but these parts have been hard to source)
Support components: A high-speed 4-bit SDIO micro-SD card slot for logging. 8 Kbytes of EEPROM on the board. For testing and quick board state assessment, we included 3 user and 4 status LEDs. There's also a 1W audio amp in lieu of a buzzer.
Comms: XBee module (or XBee compatible) ready
Programming: The USB interface is broken-out via the power board specifically to allow development and programming.
Control: We put a host of the usual I/O on the board. Here's a break out diagram:
Every weekday in May, we’re going to be sharing a glimpse of what we’re working on behind the scenes at 3D Robotics. You’ll see many of our projects, see the facilities, meet the people and maybe get some hints at products coming out soon. There are more than 70 of us now — in three facilities — and we’re super busy, so there’s a lot to show!
Today, I’ll start off with a teaser. What do you think the above is and how is it used?
-Chris A.
In october I helped fund the parallella one board computer. There are many of those around right now, the raspberry pi, the udoo, beagleboard black, but this one is different, because it mates a super-powerful Xilinx Zynq 7020 application processor, which is a 1 ghz dual core Arm A9 (same as in ipad 2) with a FPGA fabric the size of a medium fpga chip. This makes it a highly flexible processor, one that in itself could surpass most of the ARM based flight controllers on the market right now. The fpga fabric in itself is something that could prove very useful, since it can perform signal processing with a breeze, it comes extremely natural to fpga to do filtering, pid and such real-time processes, with minimal latency.
But what's really exciting about the parallella is its epiphany 16-core or 64-core (there are two models) parallell arm processor. edit: RISC processor. This thing is perfect for computer vision, optical flow, processing point clouds for 3D scanning and on the fly GIS processing. With its super low power requirements it's perfect for battery powered robotics.
But the best part is the price, at only $99 it's something that you can loose in a crash without loosing to much sleep over it!
On the back of the board there are connectors for 48 fpga pins, uarts and more. We now need to make a daughter board with sensor and connectors for servos and ESCs, rx and all the other stuff we need, but I want everyone to chime in and voice their needs for their specific applications, what sensors do you think are the best? I've started a discussion at the parallella forums, with a community effort we can make this something really great!
Some may be interested in the bicopter VTOL airplane and flying wing plans that will be available if the project at the below link gets funded. It's basically MultiWii quadcopter and bicopter VTOL code modifications done by me. I'll be looking into a possible port to the APM for volume 2 if this project gets funded.
The below flying wing doesn't takeoff vertically but I think it's unique enough to include in the plans offering. The below images are of the single motor version but the final one will have two motors as seen in the below video.
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After 4 months of work we finish to port AP_HAL library to VR Brain.
so now we are ready for test Arduplane on VRBrain and see our VR Plane fligh in the sky :)
In this video you can see only first test that we doing last week.
Our configuration are :
We are using 3 servos configuration 1 for control the roll of plane connect to two servo , one for pitch control and other for YAW control.
We try to fly 3 mode :
Fly a Plane is a lot different that fly a Multicopter , I fly for 4 years only multicopter but my first impression is that the plane fly in more natural way than a multicopter ... less problem .... more simple to control but could be only a first impression :)
So the plane have a lot of limit respect of Multicopter but it could be a very long flight time respect to Multicopter especially in Sail Plane configuration.
The video is developed by VR Media division , the Chief of division is Daniele that's our beta tester of VR Plane.
Thanks to the DevTeam and beta tester for this great result.
original blog post : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/profiles/blogs/vr-planer-first-flight-test
Best
Roberto Navoni
Alma, Québec – April 22nd, 2013 - The municipal Council of Alma, Unmanned Systems Canada, the Alma Airport authorities and the Unmanned Aerial System Center of Excellence are proud to invite you to the 2013 Unmanned Systems Canada Student UAV Competition.
Close to a hundred students from across Canada will attend the competition from May 3rd to 5th. They will fly their own UAVs and complete various tasks such as detecting and decoding targets. Colonel Paul Prévost, Commander of the 2 and 3WING Bagotville, has graciously accepted the honorary presidency of this year’s event.
This 5thedition of the competition and is the first to be opened to the public. Anyone fascinated by the world of aviation and willing to learn more about UAVs are welcomed to attend on Saturday May 4th and Sunday May 5th between 9am and 5pm. The public is invited to tune their radios to the regional stations of RNC Media, Planète and Radio X stations, to hear capsules throughout the weekend. The admission is free for the children under 12 years old and of 3$ for the people 12 years old and over. Various activities have been organized for the public. One of the highlights of the weekend will be the Fly-by of a CF-18 Saturday at noon. Many booths and aircraft on static display will be set up for the spectators. UAVs will also be on display, including the MISKAM UAV that has been flying and tested in Alma for over a year. Other businesses interested in the UAV development will also be on display and presenting their services to the public.
“This year, the Unmanned Aerial Center of Excellence and the city of Alma have graciously agreed to host the event. The fifth edition is shaping up to be the best event to date; we are looking forward to it. The continuous success of our Student Competition is directly linked to the support of our sponsors and the host city” states Paul Drover, executive director of Unmanned Systems Canada.
“The City of Alma is proud to host the Competition. For the first time in Canada, the event will be open to public. The whole region of Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean will benefit from the competition” adds the Mayor of Alma, Mr. Marc Asselin. “The Unmanned Aerial System Center of Excellence is constantly evolving and, by hosting the competition, the UASCE is demonstrating its leadership role in the UAV development at the national and international level”, states Pascal Pilote, president of UASCE.
The Unmanned Aerial System Center of Excellence has recruited over 60 volunteers to deliver this major event, which will attract many new companies and sponsors from across Canada and the United States. The sponsors, as well as all team members, their coaches and the organizing committee will be staying in Alma during the competition. Many local businesses generously agreed to sponsor the event and they hope to benefit from the national visibility. The competition will likely provide an important economic impact to the city of Alma.
Canadian student UAV competition
Unmanned Systems Canada (USCSTC)has been organizing the competition since 2007. The main objective of this competition is to promote and develop the Canadian expertise in the UAV sector at the colleges and universities level.
The Unmanned Aerial System Center of Excellence (UASCE) works toward becoming an international center of expertise and to offer innovative services such as manufacturing, research and development, testing and training. The student competition being held in Alma is a great opportunity to promote our services and to inform the public on the purpose and uses of UAVs.
Let the Competition Begin - A Hundred Students Set To Fly Their Own UAVs
WASHINGTON — Thousands of unmanned aircraft systems – commonly known as drones – could be buzzing around in U.S. airspace by 2015 because of a law passed last year, aiding in police investigations, scientific research and border control, but also raising safety and privacy concerns among some lawmakers and advocacy groups.
Already, drones are in use to count sea lions in Alaska, to conduct weather and environmental research and to monitor drug trafficking across our borders. In fact, 327 drones already have been licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration to fly over U.S. soil.
But the FAA expects that number to increase to 30,000 by 2020, fueling what could become a $90 billion industry.
A FRENCH postgraduate student has completed seven months research at Harper Adams University developing an unmanned aircraft for use in agriculture.
Marc-Alexandre Favier, from Bourg-en-Bresse, in eastern France, came to Harper Adams as part of his Masters in Mechatronic Systems – Engineering from the University of Osnabruck in Germany.
He will return to Germany on May 1 where he will give a presentation in Berlin on the research he has carried out during his time at Harper Adams, near Newport.
The 27-year-old designed a prototype Unmanned Air System (UAS) to be used as an eye in the sky for farmers who often have to manage and monitor livestock on very large and remote estates.
He used an AR Drone 2 with a camera attached to the bottom to allow the user to get a bird’s eye view and came up with a computer program which instructs the drone to locate, recognise and track livestock.
Although the drone can be controlled via WiFi on a computer, the aim is for farmers to be able to control it using an iPhone or smartphone.
Marc-Alexandre said: “The number of robots for professional use is increasing significantly so it is very important for Masters students to be up-to-date with robotics – it’s the future and the present.”
He said his prototype was designed with Scottish sheep farmers in mind, many of whom spend large amounts of time and cover many miles monitoring their livestock.
“The idea is to combine using a quad bike with an unmanned aerial vehicle to help the shepherd not to have to spend too much time managing his flock,” he added.
“I have therefore developed a functional prototype drone to recognise and track sheep.”
Marc-Alexandre, who hopes to work in the area of field robotics once he completes his Masters, said he had thoroughly enjoyed his time at Harper Adams.
“I want to thank Harper Adams and the people who work here,” he added.
“There were two reasons I wanted to come to Harper Adams. Firstly, to improve my English and to learn about English culture, and secondly, because Harper Adams is investing in the area of field robotics.
“I have had a very nice time here because you are living around nature but at the same time it is like living in a city because there is a lot of activity at Harper Adams and in the surrounding area.
“Harper Adams has also opened my eyes to Asia because I have worked with fellow researchers from China. This has been a very good experience and I have learnt about Chinese culture and gained extra knowledge from them.”
Hey everyone! We finally got a small shipment of these in and have a few left. Available now at www.aeroworksproductions.com Specs are available on our website.
Available in Black and White!
Hi there welcome back,
Here is a little picture of the first version of my quad hybrid projet
It's a version to allow "Maxime carrier" to crash it 1 or 2 time before it's broke XD.
The design of the 2 rotating propeler is pending until i got the missing part. beteween 2 and 3 week. and if we can make it flight straight the next step is amovible airfoil aérodynamic design for high speed flight. it' a really tuff design ready to get strong impact of aproximatly 9G before major repair.
That's a short post to get you informed
Have a nice day
Xavier Simard-Lecours
Hi guys,
I was asked to come film in avoriaz, france to film for the volcom rail jam, video above.
I have flown in snow storms and temperatures down to minus 10 with no problems, but i discovered on this day is the dangers of "freezing fog". You can see from the video that it was only snowing a little, wind was gentle and it was a positively warm 5 degrees. I thought this was going to be a good day to get the most out of my hexa and show people what we can achieve using a drone.
However, on my first flight after just a couple of minuets i was in real trouble. I was at full power and coming down. Luckily i was near my landing zone and i managed to make a hard controlled landing. Normally i can fly for 20 mins no problem so was a little perplexed at my loss of power.
A quick inspection revealed the problem. A thick layer of ice on the underside of the props. My drone hovers at about 60 percent throttle, but with just a millimetre of ice on the bottom of each prop i can't even take-off! In hindsight it was an obvious danger, but be warned the dangers of freezing fog.
Unfortunately the weather got worse and my first flight was the only shot used in the video edit, they used as their intro. I was disappointed but the clients were happy,and impressed that i flew at all in the conditions. I have been asked to com and do the tour next winter perhaps!
What i need now is a solution to freezing props. I know that real choppers use heated blades, but i can't see that being available to us for a while. I think if i had a heated cabin and 2 hexa's flying in rotation with pre heated props that it might be possible. If anyone's got any ideas i'll happily test them....
Thanks tristan
After having a look at the below upside down mounting of an APM2.5, I thought I would share my APM mounting as an alternative. I created my own Bixler 2 canopy with some plastic board I bought at the local Bunnings warehouse for a couple of dollars. I ripped off the original plastic and stuck it on, as well as installing some hobbyking rare earth magnets for a decent mount. It seems to work really well, and keeps everything well contained. I was able to fit a minimosd in below the GPS, and the wires at the back feed to the FPV camera and the 3DR radio.
The EBTS launches the first UAV simulator developed in Brazil in accordance with the strictest international standards. The SEV Fm - EBTS UAV Simulator Full Mission replicates all flight characteristics, operation and navigation of the Hermes family of UAVs. Parallel to this, new UAVs can be created and incorporated into the simulator feature that makes the SEV Fm multi-device providing the scalability and flexibility odd market simulators.
Original Post: http://www.ebts.com.br/?pag=defesa&id=61
The high fidelity of scenarios based on virtual reality is exploited to its limit in the system. The UAV operator trainee controls the camera, while the UAV flies over the landscape. The trainee is presented with images similar to those of a UAV operator real and identical to those found during an actual mission.
The high fidelity of the SEV Fm results in an integrated product that combines a station operator of a vehicle with a synthetic environment to support training and operations will use UAV.
The ground control station (GCS) is used for simulation of an air vehicle in a synthetic space mission, providing operators (pilot vehicle operator and mission payload) a consistent interface.
The multi-purpose nature of the SEV Fm allows it to be used throughout the life cycle of a UAV, operational analysis and definition of platform for acquisition and conduct of the mission.
Typically, the phases of the life cycle are as follows:
• Requirements analysis and definition
• Interactive Design
• Acquisition
• Training
• Operations
UAVs preconfigured
• Elbit Hermes 450
• Other models implemented on demand
Character
• Low cost
• Ability flight piloted or autonomous
• IR Sensors (FLIR)
• Sensors with optical zoom 70 times
• Modular - principal components can be added or replaced as needed
• Reconfigurable - can be adapted to the need at each stage of the life cycle
• Open architecture - Interconnection with other simulators via DIS / HLA. The SEV Fm is totally interconnected with other simulators EBTS
• Management station mission (EGM) - create and manage exercises
• Environment synthetic high fidelity geo-referenced
• Simulation camera:
Zoom
Visions thermal
Vision IR
• Reconfigurable for other models of UAV in accordance with the manufacturer's specifications
Main applications training
• UAV / UAS - operator training
• UAV / UAS - training sensor operators / Payload
• UAV / UAS - training commanders missions
• Training of operators ISR
• Visual interpretation and analysis of intelligence data
• Integrates with other generating sets and synthetic environments
More info: http://www.ebts.com.br
I've flown a lot of different planes while working on ArduPlane, but it wasn't till yesterday that I first flew what is perhaps the most popular plane for new ArduPlane users - the Bixler2.
While setting it up on Saturday evening I had a bit of a look through some Bixler build logs in the forums, and I was surprised to find that none of the suggested ways of mounting the APM were really convenient. Some people put it in the bottom of the fuselage, which makes it difficult to get cables to, and hard to work on. Some used custom or commercial mounting systems for putting the APM on the top at the front, but that makes the Bixler less aerodynamic, and trying to cram all the accessories like telemetry radio and GPS in makes it a tricky fit.
The solution I came up with is to mount the APM upside down on the underside of the canopy. ArduPlane has supported the AHRS_ORIENTATION option for a few releases now, which allows you to have your APM mounted in a lot of different orientations. In this case it seemed perfect to use AHRS_ORIENTATION=8 and mount it upside down on the bottom of the canopy. The advantages are:
I also used a pin through the plastic top of the canopy to hold the canopy on more firmly, as I don't really trust the magnets. You will also notice a couple of pins stopping the wings coming loose - those fuselage screws are rather loose and one came loose on the first flight.
This mounting system is also ideal for a PX4. I happened to use an APM2.5 for this build as I was doing bench tests on my PX4, but either one works with the AHRS_ORIENTATION option.
One thing to watch for with AHRS_ORIENTATION is that you need to reboot and then re-level your plane after setting it. It is best to use the CLI full accel calibration, so it can properly adjust for the slight pitch of the canopy bottom surface.
Cheers, Tridge
