Blogs

At the AUVSI conference, Silent Falcon UAV of Alburquerque, New Mexico unveiled a solar powered UAV. The UAV has up to 14 hours of flight endurance. Detailed report from Denver Business Journal and Silent Falcon UAV's own website

Some new small-scale UAVs from Lockheed Martin, plus the latest in blimp with huge radar arrays and onboard power generation. Always interesting to see the standardization on Xbox-style controllers for the little ones. 

From the MIT press release:

MIT’s Robust Robotics Group — which fielded the team that won the last AUVSI contest — has set itself an even tougher challenge: developing autonomous-control algorithms for the indoor flight of GPS-denied airplanes. At the 2011 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), a team of researchers from the group described an algorithm for calculating a plane’s trajectory; in 2012, at the same conference, they presented an algorithm for determining its “state” — its location, physical orientation, velocity and acceleration. Now, the MIT researchers have completed a series of flight tests in which an autonomous robotic plane running their state-estimation algorithm successfully threaded its way among pillars in the parking garage under MIT’s Stata Center.

“The reason that we switched from the helicopter to the fixed-wing vehicle is that the fixed-wing vehicle is a more complicated and interesting problem, but also that it has a much longer flight time,” says Nick Roy, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and head of the Robust Robotics Group. “The helicopter is working very hard just to keep itself in the air, and we wanted to be able to fly longer distances for longer periods of time.”

With the plane, the problem is more complicated because “it’s going much faster, and it can’t do arbitrary motions,” Roy says. “They can’t go sideways, they can’t hover, they have a stall speed.”

Found in translation

To buy a little extra time for their algorithms to execute, and to ensure maneuverability in close quarters, the MIT researchers built their own plane from scratch. Adam Bry, a graduate student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and lead author on both ICRA papers, consulted with AeroAstro professor Mark Drela about the plane’s design. “He’s a guy who can design you a complete airplane in 10 minutes,” Bry says. “He probably doesn’t remember that he did it.” The plane that resulted has unusually short and broad wings, which allow it to fly at relatively low speeds and make tight turns but still afford it the cargo capacity to carry the electronics that run the researchers’ algorithms.

Because the problem of autonomous plane navigation in confined spaces is so difficult, and because it’s such a new area of research, the MIT team is initially giving its plane a leg up by providing it with an accurate digital map of its environment. That’s something that the helicopters in the AUVSI challenges don’t have: They have to build a map as they go.

But the plane still has to determine where it is on the map in real time, using data from a laser rangefinder and inertial sensors — accelerometers and gyroscopes — that it carries on board. It also has to deduce its orientation — how much it’s tilted in any direction — its velocity, and its acceleration. Because many of those properties are multidimensional, to determine its state at any moment, the plane has to calculate 15 different values.

That’s a massive computational challenge, but Bry, Roy and Abraham Bachrach — a grad student in electrical engineering and computer science who’s also in Roy’s group — solved it by combining two different types of state-estimation algorithms. One, called a particle filter, is very accurate but time consuming; the other, called a Kalman filter, is accurate only under certain limiting assumptions, but it’s very efficient. Algorithmically, the trick was to use the particle filter for only those variables that required it and then translate the results back into the language of the Kalman filter.

Confronting doubt

To plot the plane’s trajectory, Bry and Roy adapted extremely efficient motion-planning algorithms developed by AeroAstro professor Emilio Frazzoli’s Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems (ARES) Laboratory. The ARES algorithms, however, are designed to work with more reliable state information than a plane in flight can provide, so Bry and Roy had to add an extra variable to describe the probability that a state estimation was reliable, which made the geometry of the problem more complicated.

Paul Newman, a professor of information engineering at the University of Oxford and leader of Oxford’s Mobile Robotics Group, says that because autonomous plane navigation in confined spaces is such a new research area, the MIT team’s work is as valuable for the questions it raises as the answers it provides. “Looking beyond the obvious excellence in systems,” Newman says, the work “raises interesting questions which cannot be easily bypassed.”

But the answers are interesting, too, Newman says. “Navigation of lightweight, dynamic vehicles against rough prior 3-D structural maps is hard, important, timely and, I believe, will find exploitation in many, many fields,” he says. “Not many groups can pull it all together on a single platform.”

The MIT researchers’ next step will be to develop algorithms that can build a map of the plane’s environment on the fly. Roy says that the addition of visual information to the rangefinder’s measurements and the inertial data could make the problem more tractable. “There are definitely significant challenges to be solved,” Bry says. “But I think that it’s certainly possible.”

Well worth a read, no really don't ignore it if you are in the UK. Yes you can fly for fun and do nothing but if you turn a penny or pint you need to comply.

http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/33/CAP722.pdf

If you are in the USA you might read it and cross your fingers that you are going to get such sensible regs, sadly after the AUVSI conference it would seem not! Just keep remembering ASTM F-38....

I love my Walkera Ladybird nanocopter, which costs $129 and is incredibly fun to fly. But now you can get a clone for just $49, complete with RC unit. This one does flips, too!

BTW, you should check out all the other crazy microcopters in Walkera's UFO line. This is just a sampling:

The latest from Procerus, recently acquired by Lockheed Martin. No word on pricing, but I'm guessing in the tens of thousands of dollars. 

Recently I started the DC Hardware Startup meetup as a complement to the many Web 2.0-ish entrepreneur meetups in the DC area and elsewhere, and then reached out to the organizers of similar meetups around North America. Two are about a year old- the SF Hardware Startup meetup and Solid State Startups, both near Silicon Valley. Two others, one based in New York City and one based in Toronto, are also at most about a month old. The common themes are as you'd expect- rapid prototyping / 3D printing, lean methods/manufacturing, open source HW, etc., and of course entrepreneurship.

I've been in contact with most of the above groups, and we agree there is something larger than anyone one regional meetup group. We would like to find a way to bring these communities together, and I'd be happy to take your input there. If any new similar groups form, please do let us know. In the mean time, Nick Pinkston of the SF group put together a few initial resources as a seedling:

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/hwstartups

Twitter ('bot feed from Reddit): @HWStartups

Hardware Overflow prototype site: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/42563

Below is the opening description of the DC Hardware Startup group:

-----

I am happy to share a CAD model of the Turnigy Talon Hexacopter airframe (available from Hobbyking), to be used for our integration purposes. It can be found here: http://grabcad.com/library/hobbyking-turnigy-talon-hexacopter-frame. It should be fairly accurate, but please report any problems you may find.

I am planning to release more models once I am progressing with my hexacopter design here: http://grabcad.com/fiepel-1.

Talk about unlikely partners. The ACLU and the Tea Party unite against drones!

Excerpt from US News story:

The ACLU-Tea Party bill, which will be introduced by Virginia delegate Todd Gilbert in early 2013, when Virginia's legislative session resumes, looks to put strict limits on when and how drones can be used.

....

Although the coalition has yet to draft the bill, an ACLU press release says the legislation will prohibit law enforcement from using drones without a specific warrant, prohibit the retention of data, video, and photos that are not related to an ongoing police investigation, and require law enforcement to alert the public that drones are flying in their area.

"What the legislation is intended to do is to place strict scrutiny on ability of government to use [drones] to monitor our citizens," Gilbert says. "We want to make sure we live in the kind of world envisioned by our founding fathers, not one envisioned by George Orwell."

I guess even the big boys have to try a couple of times before they get it right. :)

We've posted these bird stabilization videos before (chickens are amazing!) but they never cease to impress. As good as we are with digital electronics, nature always does better with analog circuits.

(via Kottke)

We've posted an instructional video for installing our 9x DIY Upgrade Kit in either a FlySky TH9x or Turnigy 9x radios.

While this video is specific to the kit we sell, I think you'll find the information useful even if you bought the individual parts from other sources. It covers installing the LED backlight and the Smartieparts Programmer board, as well as other parts of the kit and also our 9x Battery Kit.

The video is divided into sections allowing you to skip to the needed information:

- Kit and Radio Overview - 0:35
- LED Backlight Installation - 2:25
- Smartieparts Programmer Installation - 13:05
- 9x Battery Kit Installation - 20:16
- Thumb Stick Installation - 21:27
- Color Switch Covers - 24:00

Let us know if this video helps and also what else you would like us to cover.

Thanks for watching!

For more information about the DIY Upgrade Kit and the other products we offer, please visit our site:
ParkeFlyer.com

Intro music by the greatest rock band you've never heard of... Pong.

The idea of using homebrew drones for independent journalism is picking up steam globally. I just got a digital copy of a story from Aug-Sept issue of seLecT (http://www.select.art.br), the Brazilian art & design magazine, about that same topic. It features interviews with the Occucopter developer Tim Pool, Nebraska Drone Journalism Lab professor Matt Waite, and myself. You can click on the photos to enlarge the text, but it's in Portuguese, so I've included a quick Google translation below:

AT THE END OF 2011, A JOURNALIST OF 25 YEARS HAS BECOME THE SPOKESMAN OF ONE OF THE MORE RECENT EVENTS DISSATISFACTION WITH THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS. Armed with a backpack with solar batteries capable of supplying your phone, Tim traveled the Square Pool Zucotti with watchful eyes and wait to record the voltage potential of the environment. Occupy The Wall Street had begun in September and dragged by the month of November, when the winter began to condense on the streets of New York. The idea of solar batteries in the backpack allowed Pool broadcast live via cell phone news channel free online Ustream for more than 20 hours per day. The images were relayed by Reuteurs, Al-Jazeera and the NBC, and he became a world celebrity.

The newest venture from Tim Pool could well have come out of a James Bond film and stands as one of the pioneers to practice journalism Drone. Any vehicle operated remotely, for example, airplanes and helicopters used in model aircraft, can be defined as a drone. Recently, Pool, along with his partner Sam Shapiro, coupled to a Parrot AR Drone - a kind of helicopter with four propellers - a camera that transmits images and aerial information in real time.

... "The Occucopter allowed us access to a gray area in terms of coverage. We can do aerial images closer and act quickly in conflicts. We wanted to test the potential of this technology amid such restriction, "Pool said in an interview to select, who confessed to the drone created as a way to show the abuses committed by police during Occupy Wall Street, which was not being shown by the mainstream media .

...

"The civil aviation authorities have stated categorically that the use of drones in the media coverage is prohibited by law. By statute the Federal Aviation Administration you can not use a remote control airplane for commercial purposes (among other things). They consider journalism a commercial activity, "said Professor Matt Waite, the journalism school at the University of NebraskaLincoln and founder of Journalism Lab Drone, the first of its kind that has news at a university.

According to Waite, despite the ban on aerial drones, its growth in journalistic practices is happening because the North American authorities themselves enacted a law that will take effect from 2015, approving the use of drones type UAV-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (Vehicle Unmanned Aerial) for commercial use.

Throughout his career, Waite dedicated to make coverage based on using remote sensing data, collected mainly by satellite. In the 2000s, he used the satellites in an investigative piece about the illegal burial of conservation areas of the Florida swamps. He believes the arrival of the drones will change the landscape of investigative journalism. "It's fun to think about how all the stories I covered as a reporter could have been much different if I had used a small UAV," reflects the teacher.

...

"I created the Society of Professional Journalists Drone because I realized that there was a need education about their ethical side. This goes from the issue of surveillance to issues of security and well-being. Some of the aerial drones can be quite heavy, and they certainly cause damage to the driver somehow lost control hundreds of feet in the air, "explained Matthew Schroyer, creator of PSDJ.

For the group, the origin of the practice has always been linked to free enterprise, and especially to activism. "The origin of Journalism Drone can be traced back to Vienna, Austria, in 2004. The System-77 Civil Counter Reconnaissance was a consortium of activists, concerned about the level of government surveillance, which launched its own robot to monitor the implementation of laws. Do not know if aerial drones have been used, but the robot was very effective to show the truth to the public, "recalls Schroyer said by e-mail to select. But for the activist, Journalism Drone really made its mark in 2011, during the occupation movements worldwide.

As Tim Pool, Schroyer works in a series of models that involve activities such as hacktivism, and despite the concern with the "for worse" these tools, he believed the journalism Drone will become a business of the future. "Television stations will look at the drones as substitutes for the helicopter, and sports channels will use them to improve the sports coverage. But the true vocation of journalism in newsrooms drone is nonprofit and independent journalists, because they have more freedom and incentive to take risks and innovate, "he concludes.

Feature:
5 Channel Full Function Radio Controlled (Aileron,Elevator,Rudder,Throttle,Flaps)
New 2.4GHz spectrum technology, with the functions of automatic identification and precise code pairing, strong anti-jamming, and allow more than 20 aircrafts to fly at the same field at same time
Perfect for beginners flying RC model airplanes for the very first time!
Super huge wingspan for superoptimal flying experience and stability!
Fly steadily and operate easily, beginners can master the flying skills in short time
Configured with flaps to reduce speed and shorten landing distance when descent for landing
Simple and easy to assemble
Perfect for FPV(First Person View) usage
Constructed of EPO Flex Foam for Excellent Impact Resistance!
Detachable main wings excellent for transportation
All spare parts and accessories are available

Specification:
Wingspan: 2400mm (94.5 inch)
Length: 1350mm (53.1 inch)
Flying Weight: 2000g (70.5 oz)
Drive System: 1250KV brushless outrunner motor
Speed Controller: 40amp brushless ESC
Servo: 6X 17g

Package Include:
Airplane (95% assembled)
Pilot Figure
User Manual
Required 4 Channel or above Transmitter and Receiver (NOT INCLUDED)
Required 3S Li-Po Battery Balance Charger (NOT INCLUDED)
Required 11.1V 3S 3600mAh 25C Li-Po Battery (NOT INCLUDED)

http://www.bananahobby.com/2391.html

I've been trying to decide between the various Easystar-like planes for my next FPV and (hopefully) Arduplane platform.  Could this be the best of both worlds?  Between the Easystar clones of various sizes, the Skywalker types and all the other good options out there, how does one decide?

Thoughts on this plane?  Thoughts on this dilemma?

As is customary and traditional, we celebrate every new 1,000 members here and share the traffic stats. This time it's 28,000!

There were 1.4 million page views this month, tied for our record. It took us just 27 days to get this latest 1,000 members--we're averaging about one new member every 38 minutes.

Thanks as always to all the community members who make this growth possible, and especially the moderators who approve membership applications and blog posts and otherwise answer questions and keep things ticking here. We've got about 60 moderators now, but if anyone would like to join this group, please PM me. If you've been here for a while and have been participating, you'll fit in great.

There was an ESRI (ArcGIS) conference in San Diego a couple weeks ago - videos of the plenary sessions have just come available.  

Notable is the UAV section of the mid-morning session - fast forward to minute 78:
http://videoembed.esri.com/iframe/1604/000000/width/480/0/00:00:00
(http://www.esri.com/events/user-conference/agenda/plenary-videos.html)

Several things were demonstrated, notably the live video feed connection to ArcGIS using an ESRI plugin called "full motion video add-in".

The connection is possible because of a metadata stream referred to as "MISB" (http://www.gwg.nga.mil/misb/faq.html).  I wonder how difficult this stream of data is to glean or convert using APM2 telemetry and a fixed camera?  (I suspect camera position is also worked into MISB data)

Has anyone tried this?  I'd like to try with the municipality I work for - but would love to not have to reinvent that wheel, also...
cheers,

jake

ZeroUAV, Chinese leading UAV manufacturer in China, has release their YS-X6 multi rotor controller. Hobbyking sells it and says it is 'the best multi-rotor controller' in the market.

The flight controller system for multi-rotor aircraft is supported on Android, IOS and PC systems and provides auto-navigation, target lock, self-leveling and position/altitude hold. It features a an expansion interface for future upgrades.

According to the product description, this is the must have for professional and industrial platforms. But, as a hobbyist you might want to have this controller too. A robust design and military rank hardware.

The YS-X6 offers 8 channels for motor control, 3 channels for pan/tilt and a 8 channels for the receiver. It supports the S-BUS standard and provides 3 communication ports.

Of course, this all comes with a price. The YS-X6 controllers is yours for US$ 1033.00

Manual downloadable from the Hobbyking website here: http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uploads/84900712X365809X10.pdf

Product page: http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=25925&aff=5361

I've been wanting to build a balance bot for ages and I finally have to time to make one. ArduBalance leverages the existing code base of ArduCopter to produce a simple autonomous balancing robot. Features include:

• GPS, opt_flow, and dead-reckoning

• Ardupilot mission scripting

• Full RC control

• Heading hold

• Position hold

• Stabilization, RTL, AUTO, GUIDED, FBW modes

• Mavlink 1.0 support

• APM1 and APM2 support

I'm still in the very early stages of development (this video is literally the first RC controlled run), but most of the feature have been ported from ArduCopter already. This project is closed source for now until development settles down.

The current version is an inverted foam core T, but this will evolve to something much more interesting.

Jason

Recent development with ( www.interspec.org ) and University Victoria ENGR466 class, created the SeaMonkey ROV using a Arduino based control system.

our facebook group has some pictures this is a non profit development

https://www.facebook.com/groups/minirov/

Way back in December last year, I put up this post which showed me ground testing 3g Telemetry.

Since then I've been very busy with other projects and only got back around to looking at 3g Telemetry last month.
I bought the new Skywalker X8 platform as the Hugin in the above post just was not strong enough to cope with AP duties.
The X8 is the perfect APM platform, I really can't rate it highly enough. It has mountains of space, can easily carry a 2kg payload and I'm getting flight durations of in excess of 1 hour and 20 minutes with 10Ah of lipo's on board.

I'm a fan of keeping things simple so only having 2 servo's on board increases reliability. About the only down side (which is actually an upside for me) is that it has an insane glide ratio, this makes landings slightly challenging, however it does help achieve the long flight times. Some X8 users have already added parachutes, however I tend to enjoy the challenge of bringing her down incident free.

I've flown around 20 flights now on 3g Telemetry and it works really well, I've had less trouble with it than the usual point to point radios and the range is well.... practically limitless. Not to mention the simplicity of my ground station setup, no antennas and nothing else to cart around other than my laptop and phone.

A lot of people commented in the previous post that I would not get great altitude, my testing has revealed I can go very high (thousands of feet) and still have plenty of signal. My longest flight has been 45km, which tested hand-off between cell towers which is also seamless.

The great thing about the fatbox is that its plug and play, it has built in dynamic DNS so you don't need to know the IP address you are allocated.

Data usage averages around 7mb for a 1 hour flight.

If you are keen on doing this yourself, make sure you join the group "Telemetry over cellular IP" some users are making some great progress on code that allows cheap 3g modules to be plugged directly into the APM.

Also take the time to read my previous post here which covers off the important topic of cellular APN's and how to make sure you get your SIM cards configured correctly to allow a direct non-fire walled connection to the internet.