Blogs

What's going on in China now is very impressive. From SUASNews:

It's thought at least 100 teams took part in the AVIC Cup International Unmanned Machine Innovation Contest in Beijing  at the end of September. Six Teams came from the Northwestern Polytechnical University Shaanxi Province alone.

 

The prize money was good and the main challenge, a carrier landing difficult. Very few reports have emerged so far but there is this tantalizing video clip. Some very competent looking entries  performing autonomous landings on a simulated carrier deck.

GroundControl and MAVLink have been improved substantially behind the scenes over the last months. The most obvious new feature on the user level are custom user widgets. You can configure yourself parameter sliders and buttons and even export this widget into a *.qgw file, which other users can import. The video shows how to create a custom attitude control widget for ArduPilotMega. Most of the other improvements are speed and stability improvements which are not directly visible, but improve the user experience a lot. Since we wanted to make sure to get some testing done this is the first preview of the new version. Before end-users can test it, it will also require porting all autopilots, e.g. APM, to MAVLink v1.0.0, which is already scheduled and will happen in a few weeks. Porting is straightforward, as the C-API is mostly unchanged, only a few message signatures were updated.

Thanks to Andrew Tridgell and Paul Grobler for their contributions on the protocol. And Andrew Tridgell completely rebased the protocol generator on Python, allowing to now generate C and Python code from a single generator.

A porting guide for autopilots will be available soon.

This was my ArduPlane F22 Twin 70mm EDF on it last 2 flights before I stalled it trying to do a high alpha fly by.  The crash is at the end of the video, but a totally awesome take off is at the start, I got vertical straight after rotating.

http://www.vimeo.com/29904029

I made following modifications

wing span increased to 74 in

root cord 12inch

Tip cord 9inch

Tested with 2x8000mah Tenergy pack

got 1hr endurance

Di-hedral 4inch from wing tip 

IT is very hard to turn from aileron will reduce the di-hedral to 2inch

Prop apc 1407E will test 1412E

Takeoff weight was 4000grams

So today i tried to make a movie with the GoPro and the OCTOV platform and it seems to be stable.

Next step is to put caoutchouc under the motors to absorb more vibration.

This Plateform is really dedicaded for movie !! enjoy Guys !!

From this week's New Yorker

After several crashes my frame has finally evolved into something I'm fairly happy with. It uses all standard AC2 kit electronics, but custom built frame/arms, etc. It has a modular base so I can easily change out Camera mount for just plain, centralised battery mount. The camera mount has an offset battery position to keep COG towards the middle. The camera mount base has silicone dampeners (from CD-Rom drive) to minimise vibes, as well as velcro on the final mount.

The pictures show the wooden prototype and then final 3mm Acrylic flying example (above and at the bottom.)

Some specs:

-1280 APM, 850Kv 2830/12 standard motors, and 20Amp ESC's from jDrones

-5000mAh 3S Lipo Turnigy

-GoPro HD, outputting to 1.2Ghz Tx for 7" TFT & Fatshark goggles on ground for FPV flying.

-2.46 Beta code

-Current sensor, sonar, Turnigy scale light kit

-12mm Aluminium arms, (Carbon ones on way from Hobbyking) PDB in middle of frame sandwich with ESC's.

-Laser cut 3mm Acrylic double sandwich long legs to keep GoPro clear of grass

-Frame plates are 3mm laser cut acrylic (wanted Alum, but quotes too expensive to get cut so far, still looking)

-Modified Motor mounts to allow 4 rubber o-rings on screws for Anti-Vibes.

-Droidworx PetG dome

Here is a video of it:

hi friends, whenever we fly in automode using APM there is always some chance of a bad crash. we do lose some expensive equipment. APM is quite expensive for almost $400 and not counting the mid night hours that go in debugging. so i have worked on a aluminum APM housing which is quite strong with 1.5mm thickness and is sufficiently large to house the APM and the Rx. The external dimensions are L112xW53xH38mm. Weight is 106gms. The APM fits snugly into the width with enough space to place a Futaba size Rx. I place a Thomas Scherrer 12Rx inside which is quite large. The slots are CNC cut into  PCB grade aluminum anodized channel. slightly heavy but quite strong. he cost works to be high since it is not mass produced and the CNC guy charges lot of money for each piece. would find a way out to bring the cost down so our DIY Drones community can beniefit.

One of the cool things about the 3D Robotics factory in San Diego is that it's near the Naval air station and there are a load of cool military aircraft flying by all the time. Today, the Blue Angels were practicing while the 3D Robotics team was testing some new ArduCopter hardware. 

(via 3D Robotics engineer Allen Sanchez's Twitter feed)

One of the biggest challenges in an open source development project is getting the "architecture of participation" right. Like a great game, contributing should be easy to pick up but hard to master, giving people of all skills and experience an opportunity to engage. Right now we have scores of developers working on dozens of projects, but a lot of it is behind the scenes on private email lists, Skype calls and IM threads, Google Docs and 3D Robotics project trackers.  You can see the tip of the iceberg in the change logs, but that's just a hint of the activity that goes on every day.

If you'd like to get involved with the DIY Drones dev teams, here are a few places to start:

• The Dronecode Project (part of the Linux Foundation), which is the umbrella organization for the APM, PX4 and other DIY Drones software projects
• The DIY Drones Developers site
• The GitHub code repositories
• The Drones Discuss developers email list
• The Documentation Editors User Group
• The ArduCopter/Plane Issues List

The 3D Robotics PhoneDrone Android/RC interface board is finally in production! Pre-orders are starting now and it will ship on Oct 17th. From the product listing:

It's a way to connect any Android device (2.3.4 or higher) to the world of RC and UAVs.The board has 8 channels of RC in and out, with PWM-to-PPM conversion and multiplexing between RC and Android control. You just plug the Android's phone USB connector into the board and you have two-way communications with RC gear and any other board, such as APM.

 That means that you can switch between RC control and Android control or mix the two. An example would be "fly/drive by wire". You steer your vehicle via RC, but an Android phone does the actual control using its onboard IMU. On a car, that would allow every turn to be a high-speed controlled drift, for instance (we may show something like that at Maker Faire).

Or, with a UAV, you might have the Android phone doing high-level image processing and object tracking, sending mission commands to an autopilot board such as APM. You might also want to use the phone's long-distance wireless instead of an Xbee for two-way telemetry.

 This can either replace APM if you've got equivalent code running on Android, or compliment it with the Android device doing image processing or long-distance wireless comms.

It took a while to get a pick-and-place smart feeder for one of the components on this board, so apols for the delay. We're good now ;-)

It looks to me that the sad day we all knew would eventually come has arrived. The first person that I have heard of plotting to use R/C planes to bomb the Pentagon and the Capital building. It appears he was planning to use some kind of autopilot given that they stated the plane was to be "GPS guided". Below is a link to the CNN page that has the details. I only hope this doesn't lead to a complete lock down of the R/C and sUAS industry. It is so young and ripe for growth and innovation. 

http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/28/us/massachusetts-pentagon-plot-arrest/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Hey everyone, I've been trying to tackle the issue of autonomous landing for a little while now, specifically restrained to optical flow techniques. I have hit a roadblock and wanted to see if anyone on here could shed some advice on the issue.

Essentially what is happening is I have a downward looking vision chip that can successfully put a Coaxial helicopter into a hover using a minimization of OF. I want that chip to now track a moving surface underneath it, particularly a landing platform. The problem lies in that the helicopter has no way of knowing the linear velocity of the thing it is tracking. Because the OF is only calculating a height/speed ratio, there is no way to know exactly how far the surface it is tracking has displaced in the X and Y direction. I am trying to avoid using other sensors that would give me height over ground because my objective is to operate using only vision chips. Therefore, unless I constrain the speed of the landing platform and keep the height of my UAV at a very fixed height to match the linear velocity of the platform, does anyone have any suggestions on how to remedy this issue?

For reference, I am programming via an Arduino board and I am using a Centeye 16X16 vision chip. 

After Chris posted about a new sonar mount on thingverse for Arducopter, I realised that everyone who purcahsed a Arducopter 3DR frame, has a potential sonar mount included in the kit.

All the kits come with a bunch of spares (arm, centreplate, stackup plate, and leg set)  We decided to use one of the spare leg sets that are included as a sonar mount. It is reccomended that you mount the sonar at least 3 inches away from the body to avoid electrical noise/interferance, the setup about is just over 3 inches away, but If you want to mount it further out, you can do so but turning the leg over.

You will need to buy some extra screws and nuts (M3 x 25mm).  I would suggest also getting some double sided tape to secure the sonar, as there is only a single hole to mount it on the end of the leg.

Hope this is usefull for anyone who has not figured this out yet.

unmannedtechshop.co.uk

PASSED !

Spotted on Thingverse, uploaded by Jag. Nice!

Nice IMU project spotted on Dangerous Prototypes with MEMS gyros and accelerometer, Cortex-M3.

"The IMU is supposed to be high-end, implementing state-of-the-art data filtering, best low-cost MEMS sensors available and many features to compete with commercial IMUs used in robotics at a fraction of the price…"

More goodness from UC Berkeley: iBird, a robotic ornithopter that can fly towards shiny targets. Starts at 1:31 in the video above (the first part is a cockroach). From Gizmodo.

Good inspiration.

I found this bird on youtube made by a man from Norway.

4.4M wingspan.

From our Wired Science blog. This team is presenting this week at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in San Francisco this week. I'm speaking there, too, on Wed morning at 8:00 am. 

Swarms of flying robots, flocking autonomously like birds, have taken to the air near Lake Geneva, Switzerland.

At Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale’s Laboratory of Intelligence Systems in Lausanne, Sabine Hauert, Severin Leven and Dario Floreano have found a way to make small, fixed-wing machines fly together, migrate and avoid crashing. The swarms can be used for imaging and mapping the ground. In the future they may fly on search and surveillance missions.

The swarming behavior is based on a three-dimensional algorithm that represents the movements of schools of fish and flocks of birds. The algorithm, developed in 1986 by Craig Reynolds, was first used as a computer graphics tool. In the algorithm, as in real flocks, the individual agents behave simply. They respond to their close neighbors without considering the movements of the group. Yet out of the noise, larger patterns emerge, coherent and beautiful.

 

“Flocking requires three things. You need to move with the same speed and direction as your neighbors, you need to avoid hitting them and you need to stay close,” said Hauert, who is now a post-doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When programming the robots, Hauert and Floreano added in a fourth ability: migration. With this ability, the robot swarm can travel to a set location, making them more useful as search and surveillance tools.

The robots were built by senseFly, a Swiss startup founded in late 2009, as a spin-off of the work done at the Floreano’s lab. The bots communicate with each other via a simple WiFi dongle connected to the on-board Linux computer that runs the autopilot program. In this project, Hauert and Floreano searched for the best balance between the robots’ weight, cost, turning ability and the range of their communications, while keeping their ability to flock.

“You can imagine two robots working together like holding hands with someone,” Hauert said. “If one of you changes direction, but the other person can’t respond quickly enough, then you break the connection.”

To perfect the technology, they tested the robots over 200 times in the field, without any crashes. The trials began simply, eventually reaching a flock of 10 autonomous fliers. More could be added, they believe. They’ve simulated up to 100 flocking robots. Next Floreano is interested in adding different kinds of sensors, such as cameras modeled on insect eyes, so the robots would be able to avoid obstacles while staying as a flock.