I know I'm probably going to get some heat for posting this, but some of you may enjoy a little collage of a "day in the life of a BlackSheep" nonetheless
If it helps, all approvals necessary were obtained, an army of ground helpers were available, as well as constant communication with the heliport tower to stay in the loop about incoming traffic.
It's time for me to add light on the Y6 and to try to fly in the night. I let you enjoy the movie.
I put the two LED strips directly on the supply rail, hope it's the best way to do it.
it's another pleasure to flight in the night !!!
In case you're looking for an optical flow sensor, there is now one available in the DIYDrones store for a penny under $40.
This sensor is based on the ADNS3080 mouse sensor which is a good choice for optical flow because:
high resolution: 30 x 30 pixel frames meaning it can see features that lesser mice cannot
high speed: 2000 to 6400 frames per second update rate which contributes to better low light performance than other mouse sensors
SPI interface meaning it can be interfaced to many micro controllers and co-exist with other sensors
Other features:
Instructions for connecting the sensor to your APM/Oilpan are here.
Things to be careful of:
Uses including odometry and obstacle avoidance but I've used it mostly for horizontal position hold.
Note: integration with ACM and the existing GPS pos hold is a work-in-progress but should hopefully be completed in a few weeks. Here is a video of a slightly modified version of the ACM code using only optical flow (and sonar for altitude hold).
Inspiration and some technical help especially early on came from Marko Klein Berkenbusch and his blog on position hold with mouse sensor.
Hope you like it, all comments welcome!
Fournier RF5 as UAV
A low-wing stall-prone (due to specific airfoil) motoglider, flown without Pitot Tube.
Endurance 30-45min with one 4Ah battery, but it is so efficient it would fly easily for well above 1.5h.
Yet, I don't like the fact you have to throw it overhead so it will stay limited.
Cruise speed 45km/h.
Shown loiters at low altitude since at typical cruise altitude of 200m it is almost impossible to track a flying object on the sky with zoomed camera.
The Kinect Accelerator – Microsoft is now backing Kinect-based start up companies…
If you are a developer or existing team/startup focused on building a business that takes advantage of the Kinect and Natural User Interface technologies, then the Kinect Accelerator is where you need to be. Through this program, Microsoft is supporting entrepreneurs, engineers and innovators like you to bring to life a wide range of business ideas that leverage the limitless possibilities Kinect enables.
Original post by adafruit http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/11/20/the-kinect-accelerator-microsoft-is-now-backing-kinect-based-start-up-companies/
Imagine strapping into one of these instead of your standard head-mounted display for FPV!
The system, while linked to the likes of X-Plane and Microsoft Flight Sim, can take raw input from gyro data etc and put the pilot into that position. With a Mil-SPEC HMD, the system is really quite immersive and a fun ride. While not a traditional UAV related post, I thought you might be interested.
Check out Universal Motion Simulator Home for more details.
This time I've take-off in manual mode and then switched to auto. The plane starts to fly as programmed, but wind slide it few meters away from the point. That time observers starts to panic and I (never do that again) switched to manual to turn plane back to me... That was the biggest mistake! I've should wait a bit more... Luckily, nothing was broken - plane disassembled itself into 3 pieces. 5 minutes to take it together without any glue and back to the sky!
Here is a video of it. It has few other flights I did that day.
Onboard video from MonZon on Vimeo.
After that accident I did the same mistake once - this time I could rescue the plane from tree only after 2 days =)
Alright guys, here's the big heavy lift y6 I have been working on for almost 2 months now! I had it flying perfectly until a crash involving some motor troubles but now that is all sorted out now. I have re-routed the wires through the arms, stepping down the gauge significantly to do so. I also added lights, and as of now am powering the entire thing on one 12v filtered variable PSU rail and a 5v BEC for just the radio.
My wireless video TX is coming in next week and I already have all the wires in place for it, The go pro mount is stabilized, crudely. Check out the pictures.
When I saw Warthox do a loop with MultiWii I was so impressed and inside my mind i said : one day you'll make one and I kept this dream inside a little box of my head. Today was my day when i decide to try .... Well I'll let you watch the film.
One thing ;) i made it with MultiWii 9.0, someone can tell me if i can try with APM? I never saw someone do it with APM ????
From Robots.net:
In preparation for the upcoming real sea-trials, Boeing’s unmanned helicopter (based on a modified MD530F ‘little bird’) successfully landed on a moving platform towed by a truck. The project is under contract by the French armaments agency (DGA) and major partners are DCNS and Thales. Both French companies are modifying the system for its new more demanding role and next year, sea trials will be conducted over a French frigate. It is worth noticing that this particular system is not only derived from a manned system but it can be optionally piloted with a various levels of autonomy thus speeding up the development and simplifying many complex procedures that usually fully unmanned systems have. (via Ares blog)
I tried following today on 2.0.49 firmware with APM Planner 1.0.86. As you can see from the video, there was obvious lag in the command around 1/2 seconds. The other thing the quad was doing it was not coming to stabilize position when I centered the joystick. This is because of the uneven cushion I placed above table. The settings are
Joystick: Saitek Cyborg
Telemetry: 900Mhz xbees @ 57600bps link speed
frame gaui 500X
Joystick is pretty slow to respond. When I checked in windows game controller I found out that in game controller calibration looking at the raw data the joystick response is slow. So its a windows + PC issue
Make Magazine has a great new special issue on kits, which includes an interview with me on all the lessons on what not to do that I learned in the early days of DIY Drones (before we started 3D Robotics to do it right).
Here's a short excerpt from the long interview and article:
What tipped your decision to sell UAV kits, rather than just share designs?
Three or four years ago I built the Blimpduino. I had the idea that you could have an autonomous blimp that would fly around in schools, and it would be great for teaching kids about robotics.So we designed the board, and we put the Eagle files up, and said here’s a link to SparkFun’s BatchPCB, here’s the parts list to buy from Mouser and Digi-Key, and here are the instructions for putting it all together.That’s when we realized it was too hard — people just weren’t going to do it. We had to build the board for people.I made about three boards and said, “I’m never doing that again.” So we got a contract manufacturer, and found out that you really have to order at scale to get pricing. We got the money together to buy 500 boards — you have to make a leap of faith, take some capital risk to get the volume. It was a little scary.Then we realized that sourcing the other parts is also hard. Regular folks have no experience in it. I spent a ridiculous amount of time learning the economics of mylar balloons. The learning curve is steep and expensive.Kitting it was the only way to really get it into people’s hands.
What did it take to make that first kit?
The blimp envelope, the laser-cut parts, the motors— it was the same process sourcing these. We had to work with Chinese manufacturers through Alibaba to get the motors. It took months to get all the boxes of components. This meant volume ordering from a dozen different suppliers, getting samples, building test boards — all before we could sell the first kit.Eventually we got all the parts, got the boards built and tested, the firmware loaded, labels printed, and at that point I bribed the children for $1 an hour. We labeled all the parts and set up an assembly line on the dining room table. I was doing quality control,but in the end, despite all our efforts, about half the kits were missing a part. I spent months sending out extra Lego parts or motors to people. I think it’s cute that a 5-year-old forgot to put in a part, but the customer might not be as charmed.
This week I completed the first flight of my scratch built wing on the GeekStar. It has different lift properties that required a larger rudder to be added to maintain control of the aircraft, and after increasing the rudder size, it flew just fine.
That officially marks the end of the scratch built mission I've been on for the last year or so; being able to create a RC Airplane from scratch that can meet or exceed a kit's performance.
Next week will be all about testing this wing against the easy star wing to determine if it really does perform as well or better.
Successfully interfaced Arduino Mega 2560 with Hokuyo URG-04LX-UG01 LiDAR using a USB Host Shield 2.0 from Circuits @ Home....the LiDAR gives the device descriptors fine....next step is to send the VV commands and receive info from LiDAR using other USB library functions.....
I'll mount this lidar on ardupilot mega quad once this is done....planning to send lidar data to GCS via XBee....
So the modules connect like this:
LiDAR -> USB Host Shield -> Arduino Mega 2560 (on quad) -> Xbee -> GCS -> ROS
Since my previous introductory post we've installed APM in ArduWot and racked up quite a bit of flight testing. In this post I'll give you guys some details on the setup of APM and the flight testing we've done so far.
I mentioned in my previous post that we'd famliarised ourselves with APM using a flying wing before purchasing the Wot 4, for completeness here's a photo of that setup.
The poor old flying wing has suffered a lot of abuse in the past but with APM strapped to it it performed remarkably well. However as you can see it isn't the neatest looking installation and it has a fairly big impact on the wings performance. With the weight of a larger than standard battery as well as the APM it flies pretty quickly which doesn't suit our small test area. So the next step was to find a more suitable airframe with a few key features:
The Wot 4 Foam-e seemed a good match to all these criteria and so ArduWot was born. The video below shows a flight test of the Wot 4 prior to the installation of APM. We have always conducted these sorts of familiarisation flights when using a new airframe as they allow us to identify any undesirable characterists, but the Wot 4 had none!
Shortly after that flight the installation of APM started, and shortly after that it was finished! Removal of some foam reinforcement created a space the perfect size for APM, it's almost like it was designed for it.
The APM was modified to include the magnetometer and a battery lead for voltage monitoring. A small cut out was made in the fuselage ahead of the wing to mount the GPS in. Quite a bit of fiddling was needed to get APM to sit neatly without getting servo wires trapped, but eventually it went in. There's even sufficient space on top of the APM for our relatively massive receiver.
At this point we went out for a few flights to test the basic fly-by-wire functions and we were very pleased with the results. The following day we tackled the installation of a pitot-static probe.
After deciding to go with a conventional wing mounted pitot-static we spent the best part of a day figuring out the least destructive way of installing it. Eventually we decided to feed the pipes through the hollow wing to the aileron servo mount with the aid of a metal rod and a small hole cut in the wing to guide it through a rib. From the aileron servo the pipes head forwards through a hole we made in the spar and leading edge structure where they were attached to the probe. Finally a slot was cut in the leading edge to push the probe into and it was epoxied in place. The pressure sensor itself is mounted to the wing in a position that puts it directly above the APM when installed.
With the exception of a permanently installed XBee module (which is currently crammed in the battery bay), the ArduWot is complete!
Our preliminary flight tests have focused on determining the parameters for stabilisation and navigation. So far everything is going well with the APM surpassing our expectations. Before we can start using the ArduWot as a research tool we will need to create a MAVLink interface for MATLAB/Simulink and we have just started work on this. In the meantime we will continue testing what APM can do as standard (auto take off and landing look like fun!). We are also planning to contribute to Arduplane (and Arducopter with our ArduRex project), we will be implementing features such as initialisation offsets for taildragger aircraft (like ArduWot) once we are familiar with the code.
I hope this has been an interesting insight into our exploits with APM!
Scientists have invented a new material that is so lightweight it can sit atop a fluffy dandelion without crushing the little fuzzy seeds.
It's so lightweight, styrofoam is 100 times heavier.
It is so lightweight, in fact, that the research team consisting of scientists at UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and Caltech say in the peer-reviewed Nov. 18 issue of Science that it is the lightest material on Earth, and no one has asked them to run a correction yet.
That's light!
The material has been dubbed "ultralight metallic microlattice," and according to a news release sent out by UC Irvine, it consists of 99.99% air thanks to its "microlattice" cellular architecture.
So yhea, What now? :)
From a Time blog post on the photographer:
New York photographer Jamie Chung spent two and a half weeks shooting the Hummingbird—among a handful of other inventions, including the artificial leaf and a $100,000 razor—for the annual Invention Issue. “It was inspirational,” Chung says of the project. “Meeting the inventors was the best part. They’re totally comfortable with their nerddom, but so am I, so we had a lot of fun together.”
AeroVironment lead engineer Matt Keennon brought the Hummingbird to Chung’s studio, where the photographer shot it in several positions. The remote-controlled device weighs just 0.66 ounces, allowing it to go where humans can’t, be it spying or scouting out safe spots in combat zones. “It’s crazy to think something so pretty is used for something so dangerous,” Chung said. Indeed, who knew the canary in the coal mine would turn out to be a Hummingbird?
(Via BoingBoing)
The New York Times has picked up on the theme we were discussing last week, of amateurs using UAVs (or FPV aircraft) to monitor police activity at protests.
An important point raised in the article:
Despite the quality of the images, though, RoboKopter might not see a rush of orders from newsrooms just yet.
One reason is that while there is no doubt that similar aerial videos of the Occupy Wall Street protests would have gotten widespread airplay on American television this week, it is unlikely that the New York Police Department, which closed the airspace above Lower Manhattan during Tuesday’s raid, would have taken kindly to a flock of drone journalists.
Wave glider robots await launch from San Francisco in this first expedition blog post in Google Earth.
From the Google Earth blog:
Join a journey of discovery virtually in Google Earth, as Liquid Robotics launches four wave-powered robotic gliders to cross the Pacific ocean in their Pacific Crossing (PacX) Challenge Expedition. The wave gliders are attempting to set a new world record for the longest distance ever attempted by an unmanned vehicle and will be collecting data about the Pacific ocean for use by scientists and students back on dry land. These R2D2s of the sea will cross 25,000 miles over 300 days and collect over 2 million data points, helping build the record of oceanic knowledge.
To follow the wave gliders in Google Earth, download the expedition KML file or open the PacX Gallery page and click on the ship icon. You will be able to read updates from scientists sharing the latest robotic observations, from wave height in storms to weather measurements like barometric pressure, wind speed and air temperature. The ship icon will represent the location of the wave gliders, starting in the San Francisco bay.
What's going on here? This is a "Virtual Venice UAV race". It's based on the DIYDrones T3 figure of 8 competition.
The screncast's purpose is to show how pilots can potentially fly their planes in different parts of the world, and then have their geo position and time base altered so that they end up racing side by side in Google Earth.
My spoken commentary is complete fiction. I just wanted to create the human emotions that a race meet, can engender. (I actually flew the same planes somewhere near Reading in the UK on two different days).
Now, using the latest flight analyzer, any group of MatrixPilot's can have a race together, although they may actually be on opposite sides of the world. In the future, all MAVLink compatible UAVs shoud be able to do this as well. (Someone still has to develop the software).
diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/restarting-the-t3-contest-now-with-copters
code.google.com/p/gentlenav/
