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Setting up my ArduPilot system... A project post...

Posted by Benjamin Lanehart on December 18, 2009 at 1:28pm
Well the day has come, my Shield V2 arrived, and I have all the parts necessary to start building my UAV control system. This is just a documentation if you will, of my progress, hope, dreams...etc. I've been reading this site on & off for a year or two, and am now finally getting started. Within you will see my trials and tribulations, do's and don'ts( mostly don'ts so far lol) and who knows, I might be of some help with the newbies like myself. =] If you need some help like I did when you want to get started, try this link, it's what I did... =]My Ardupilot:PhotobucketI thought I would use the Swiss Machine Pin Headers after reading on Sparkfuns website that they hold really well, which is what I wanted. Also the FTDI cable works as well(my own realization).PhotobucketDO NOT USE THESE! They hold a little too well...PhotobucketYou can see in the pic above that they tend to bend when trying to pull off the shield from the ArduPilot, they can't bend a whole lot, or they break.PhotobucketSo I need to find my damn desoldering tool, and desolder ALL the machine pins off, and put in the regular headers that came with the shield. This doesn't shine a bad light on sparkfun and their products, they work really well, just not for this purpose... lolLast but not least, here's my ArduIMU V2:
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My plan is to use Doug's Ardu-IMU-Pilot code, and do some testing with it.That's it for now, until I do some desoldering, and resoldering. lolPeace out...
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MARCY 1 GROUND STATION & 1M/S TREE FOOTAGE

Posted by Jack Crossfire on December 18, 2009 at 11:39am

So got up to this. Since the reference design has a header which doesn't allow USB & programming simultaneously we now have a header. Unfortunately still no USB even at slow speed. It detects the reset but never gets a transaction.Even in circuit programming is super slow. Maybe that's related to the USB problem. This is the cleanest board we ever made but the programming speed only goes to 9375Hz. Tried disabling the radio, using a bigger capacitor for Vbus, low speed, full speed, direct soldering instead of a header, swapping chips, 5V Vdd, battery & Vbus.The programmer sends 5V through 1k resistors. The USB pins pull it down to 3.3 without burning out. Also tried 2.5V programming levels.

After banging on the 18F14K50 for a week, it was time to put it down & build a conventional 18F2450 ground station with the 18F14K50 as a radio breakout board.A radio & ground station on 1 board isn't very practical. To move the antenna, you need to move the main board & all its connections. Since the MRF49XA requires very fast SPI, that means a 2nd microprocessor on its own board & software to make it look like an XBee.Also, general purpose ground stations which can switch between 900Mhz & 2.4Ghz are more useful if we ever want to fly a pair of 2.4Ghz.For today's video, shot a fully autonomous tree sequence at 1m/s. Still had to input a lot of heading corrections. Didn't have enough battery power to finish the sequence. Unfortunately it appears L1 GPS isn't accurate enough to get very smooth camera motion even at slow speed.You're still stuck with attitude hold & manual flight. There may be an algorithm somewhere which can get smooth motion out of L1 GPS by allowing sloppy position hold but it's not as simple as reducing PID gains. VicaCopter is prone to oscillation if the PID gains aren't high enough.Fortunately the angle of attack at 1m/s was much less. Note velocity oscillation as the computer hunts for 1m/s.
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3D Robotics

iRobot co-founder's new UAV company to do bridge inspections

Posted by Chris Anderson on December 17, 2009 at 9:46pm

Helen Greiner, the co-founder of iRobot who left last year to start her own company, has announced their first project: a bridge-inspecting UAV, for which it has won a $2.4 million grant. She announced that the company is also changing its name from the DroidWorks (as Motorola discovered, George Lucas owns the rights to the word Droid and charges a lot for it), to CyPhy Works (almost as bad as the SciFi channel renaming itself to the SyFy Channel). According to press reports, the company is "working on a new inspection system based on small, unmanned, hovering robots fitted with video cameras and other sensors, officials said. The planned hovering UAV would slowly move around bridges and similar structures and send back to engineers close-up, high-fidelity images and other data for remote inspection." The idea of using UAVs for bridge inspection has been considered before by several French teams, such as this group from CNRS and our own Jean-Louis Naudin (picture above taken from his page on this project)
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3D Robotics

New quadcopter from Australian firm

Posted by Chris Anderson on December 17, 2009 at 9:30pm

From Wired's Danger Room blog: "Last month, an Australian company, Cyber Technology (WA) Pty Ltd, used a drone with ducted fans in an actual operation. Their Cyber Quad vertical take-off drone carried out an extended survey of an offshore drilling platform and an oil rig damaged by fire. The drone flew around, under and inside the two structures, which are joined by a gantry, as well as landing on them for a better look. “The ability to land the CyberQuad on the various levels of the platform where the main damage occurred gave engineers and disaster control experts the ability to see the extent of the structural damage visually,” Andrea James, head of Communications at Cyber Technology told Danger Room. The Cyber Quad can carry a high-definition video camera or sensors to detect specific gases, like industrial pollutants or chemical warfare agents. The brushless electric motor is quiet and does not produce sparks – important when investigating a damaged oil platform. Top speed is around 40 mph with a mission time of 35 minutes. But this can be extended to some hours, because the drone is able to “perch” on various landing points, and look around from there. “The UAV pilot was able to land and move about on different levels, aiming the camera to get unique and vital viewpoints of the rig structures. This was not achievable using high definition devices from manned helicopters or boats,” said James." Here's the very nice (albeit big) carrying case:

No price given. Presumably it's the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" category. Video:
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3D Robotics

"Drone pilot burnout"

Posted by Chris Anderson on December 15, 2009 at 11:58pm
This year's New York Times Magazine Year in Ideas reminded me of a good one from last year's edition: "Drone Pilot Burnout", described as follows: "On its face, it seems like the less stressful assignment. Instead of being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, some pilots and other crew members of the U.S. military’s unmanned Predator drones live at home in suburban Las Vegas and commute to a nearby Air Force base to serve for part of the day. They don’t perform takeoffs and landings, which are handled overseas. But the Predator crews at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada “are at least as fatigued as crews deployed to Iraq,” if not more so, according to a series of reports by Air Force Lt. Col. Anthony P. Tvaryanas. When Tvaryanas and colleagues surveyed crews who “teleoperate” drones in war zones a few years ago, they found an alarming result: crew members had “significantly increased fatigue, emotional exhaustion and burnout” compared with the crew of a craft that does have a pilot on board, the Awacs surveillance plane. In response, the Air Force implemented a new shift system, in which the number of days off in a row was increased. This year, in March, Tvaryanas released a fresh survey but the results were no better. There was “a pervasive problem with chronic fatigue,” Tvaryyanas writes, which “can be expected to adversely impact job performance and safety.” The survey also showed that Predator crews were suffering through “impaired domestic relationships.” Why is this? Part of the problem lies in what Tvaryanas calls the “sensory isolation” of pilots in Nevada flying drones 7,500 miles away. Although there are cameras mounted on the planes, remote pilots do not receive the kind of cues from their sense of touch and place that pilots who are actually in their planes get automatically. That makes flying drones physically confusing and mentally exhausting. Perhaps this helps explain the results of another study Tvaryanas published with a colleague in May, which examined 95 Predator “mishaps and safety incidents” reported to the Air Force over an eight-year period. Fifty-seven percent of crew-member-related mishaps were, they write, “consistent with situation awareness errors associated with perception of the environment” — meaning that it’s hard to grasp your environment when you’re not actually in it."
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Developer

Ardu-IMU-Pilot Flys - First successful test flight made today!

Posted by Doug Weibel on December 15, 2009 at 3:30pm
Today the weather finally cooperated and I dashed off to my local flying field for a long lunch.

My Ardu-IMU-Pilot had two successful flights! Performance was quite poor, but considering that I changed all the control laws and picked gains out of the air I am satisfied that the UAV was able to complete the prescribed circuit (multiple times in fact).It is funny to see this track on google earth because in fact most of the ground today was covered in snow. I'll have to remember to see how snow cover affects the thermopiles some time.What I did:I converted my current UAV (Superstar EP airframe, Brushless/lipo power system, Thermopile based ArduPilot autopilot) to a IMU based system. To do this I used ArduIMU. I connect the GPS to ArduIMU and connect the serial output of ArduIMU to ArduPilot. I have modified V2.4 of the ArduPilot code significantly to use data from ArduIMU rather than the thermopiles. I have also modified the ArduIMU code to provide a binary data message to ArduPilot.Results:My test flights today proved out the architecture. The new autopilot system successfully provided stabilization and navigation. However, performance was quite poor and I need to do some tuning of both the code and the gains.I chose to completely change the control laws. I did this for two reasons. First, because this is open source and I can! Second, because I wanted to try out some ideas for the turn-rate limiter workgroup. Briefly, I added a cross track error component to the roll control loop (zero gain today), I changed the elevator control loop so that elevator is used to maintain constant airspeed, and the throttle control loop is used to maintain desired altitude.Trying out the new elevator and throttle control laws simultaneously with poor gain choices was a disaster. So, I quickly rewrote the elevator control to just hold zero pitch. With this change things went better.What went poorly:Well, my roll gains need adjusting. Rolling into a turn would produce bank angles in excess of the desired maximum, and there was a lot of wing wagging going on at times.Also, my quick patch to hold zero pitch I believe in fact was holding some amount of up pitch relative to the wing. When the UAV was below target altitude and the throttle setting was relatively high things went well. However when the UAV got above target altitude the throttle was reduced to a low level things did not go so well. The elevator continued to hold zero pitch, which was actually some amount of positive pitch, and the airframe slowed until it stalled. I found that it (my SuperStar) does not stall nicely, with a very pronounced tip stall. This produced a couple of unwanted circles during the mission.Going forward:I think my next step will be to do some manual flying with data logging to get some data on throttle settings versus pitch & airspeed. With that data I should be able to rework the elevator and throttle controls. I would also like to log some data during some manually flown aerobatics and see how my ArduIMU results compare with those being gathered by Jose Julio.
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3D Robotics

Other amateur UAV communities

Posted by Chris Anderson on December 15, 2009 at 8:30am
For those of you who just can't enough amateur UAV info, here are some other communities worth adding to your reading list: --RC Groups UAV forum: This is the grandfather of UAV discussion forums and the second biggest after DIY Drones. --RC Universe UAV forum: Not as active as RC Groups, but still worth checking out from time to time --AttoPilot User Group: Gary Mortimer's Ning site for AttoPilot users. If you've got one, this is a must --Paparazzi User Group: Ditto --CropCam/MicroPilot User Group: Ditto --RunRyder UAV Helicopter forum: I know nothing about helis, so perhaps someone could comment on this one? Weirdly, AUVSI, the industry association, doesn't appear to have any active forums. If you know of others, please highlight them in the comments and I'll add them here.
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Developer

Public beta of the Ardupilot 2.5 Airframe Test

Posted by Jason Short on December 15, 2009 at 12:00am
Hello everyone,The Ardupilot 2.5 Airframe Test is now available as Public Beta. It goes without saying that everything seems to work, but we could use your feedback finalizing this code.Use this release to:- Configure your 2.5 Header files- verify your sensors are functioning properly- verify your servos are not reversed- verify your stabilzation is pointing your plane AWAY from the ground- verify your failsafe is functional- output handy radio values for header files- view the throttle output based on your airspeed sensor- fly a fully stablized plane with throttle based failsafeThe failsafe will cause the plane to loiter slowly at the point of failure. Just try and grab the signal at the next pass. ;)The header file has been moved to be right inline with the other files for your convenience. There are a few hardware specific options listed at the top of the header. Set yours up to fit your plane. Note: If you use this without a Z sensor, you will need to calibrate the XY sensor. (Simply point each side of the sensor at the ground/sky before flying.)For debugging, all the output is sent to the Serial monitor at 10 Hz. You will seeRadio IN: R:1501 E:1500 T:1015 (rudder, elevator, and throttle)Analog IN 0:499, 1: 529, 3: 235 (X, Y, and Z from IR)Sensors: ir_max:305 roll:0 pitch:-4 airSp:0 (IR_max higher number = more resolution, roll/pitch are angles, airspeed should be 0 at rest)PWM OUT: R:1504 E:1517 T:1024 (rudder, elevator, and throttle)As well as:set_mode: ##5| AUTOPILOT The current flight mode indication based on control switch position.*** FAILSAFE DETECTED *** The throttle has dropped 50µs below it's normal cutoff. Set this in your radio's preferences.Radio calibration:When prompted, move the Rudder (ch1) and Elevator (ch2) to the extremes to set your maximum servo travel. You will be prompted to hold the stick into position to move ahead in the process. The servos will twitch, which can be a guide to calibration in the field.Throttle input is disabled by default. Solder a wire from your channel 3 input signal pin to pin 13 to read the throttle for failsafe. Set throttle input to 1 to enable it. (Highly recommended)Adjusting the gains for attitude control - There is really one gain to worry about and that is ROLL_GAIN, and PITCH_GAIN. Lower this gain if things are squirrely up there.This code will spin the propeller. Please be careful...Best of luck,JasonSee this post for the latest version.
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3D Robotics

MIT's Eric von Hippel on open innovation models

Posted by Chris Anderson on December 14, 2009 at 9:00pm

Famed MIT open innovation researcher Eric von Hippel has a new paper out on open innovation models, of which the DIY Drones dev teams are one. It's a pretty academic read, but I thought the framework he identifies in the above diagram was very interesting. I've drawn what I think the path of autopilots has been over the past five years ago, as the ease of communications between distributed participants and the falling cost of autopilot technology has taken what was once a military-industrial technology and made it accessible to open source teams such as our own. Did I get the arrow right?
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3D Robotics

Booz: New Paparazzi project for quadcopters

Posted by Chris Anderson on December 13, 2009 at 10:35pm
Over at RC Groups, there's an interesting thread about Booz, a new Quad Rotor UAV project that uses some of the Paparazzi code as its base. They write: "This thread will be a place for all things Booz including the progress of the Booz hardware myself and Gussy are getting made. This will be for sale shortly (around one week) and will sell for US$850 including cables. It has the following features: Complete hardware using the original Paparazzi BOM, no parts removed to save costs. LEA-5H GPS. Professional PCB assembly done by a local assembly house, not soldered at home using a electric frying pan or cheap eBay oven. All parts fully tested and with code loaded, as we are in Australia we can legally do this and export them worldwide. Cables included. We are also working on some 30 amp I2C ESCs, the hardware is complete and they will be MikroKopter compatible down to the software level. These will sell for just $35 each, however, will not be sold with software on them, just a boot loader which I still have to write."
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3D Robotics

DIY Drones live chat/podcast tonight at 9:00pm PST

Posted by Chris Anderson on December 13, 2009 at 9:00pm
Free video streaming by Ustream Tonight (Sunday) we'll do our tenth podcast, which everyone here is welcome to participate in by listening to the chat live above and commenting and asking questions via the DIY Drones chat function. We'll be starting at 9:00 PM PST and will probably go about 40 minutes. This week we'll by joined by Jason Short, talking about the next version of the ArduPilot code (2.5 and 3.0). As always you can subscribe to the podcast here. Tonight's livecast will be recorded and available as a podcast on Monday.
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learning to fly with ardupilot??

Posted by jim on December 13, 2009 at 6:54am
Does anyone know if it's possible to use the ardupilot as a training aid.I'm about halfay through building a model trainer that looks like a microlight from the book 'Learn to make models that fly' called the 'Micro-T'. I intend to use this model to teach myself how to fly as my nearest modelling club is more than 50 miles away. (There is one thats closer but say they don't have a qualified instructor)Anyway could I build his model and have the ardupilot control certain functions till I get up to speed?Some off hand stats are:Span; 60"Power; .28cuin pusher4chThe best bit is that its a pusher and the last chapter on this model shows a conversion for a photo module. Easy enough to turn it into a UAV after I learn to fly (Hopefully).Thankyou for any replies
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ArduPilot AND BlimpDuino featured on Make

Posted by Pokoleo on December 13, 2009 at 12:56am
I noticed this story on one of my newsfeeds. Looking into it, it looks like BOTH Ardupilot and Blimpduino were listed as "Make Online Open Source Hardware 2009" projects. Most notably, ArduPilot was listed first in the UAV subsection, with the BlimpDuino being listed second.UAV SPecific page: here, main page here...noticed that they describe the ardupilot as the blimpduino though...If anyone's posed this so far, feel free to remove this post.
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3D Robotics

New product in the DIY Drones store: 8-ch PPM encoder

Posted by Chris Anderson on December 11, 2009 at 10:52pm
The best way to read RC signals is PPM, which is a sequential stream where each channel is output in turn on a single wire. But traditionally the only way you can get that is to open up your RC receiver and solder a wire to a special pin. Fortunately the Paparazzi team designed a board that will convert up to 8 channels of regular PWM servo signals to one PPM signal, with no RC hacking required. We've now modified it a bit to work with our failsfe multiplexer and released a version as a DIY Drones product ($24.95). BTW, the forthcoming ArduPilot Mega will use this technique, as well. From the product description:"This improved & reduced PPM encoder board, based on a Paparazzi design, plugs into the servo output ports on a R/C receiver and encodes them into a PPM pulse suitable for the paparazzi autopilot and other projects. This allows you to use any R/C equipment with the paparazzi autopilot or read up to 8 servos with a single I/O pin of your uController. Modifications to the R/C receiver are not necessary. Connect the wires from your receivers channels to the PPM and one wire to the PPM in of your system. If you decide to use the tiny board to power the receiver, make sure you put-in a jumper and plug something between the 8th channel and the receiver. The whole project is based around the ATMEL ATMEGA168/328 AVR processor and all timing is done within interrupts so accuracy and stability is optimized It is now also possible to select the PPM waveform shift, negative or positive. Firmware is free and was created by Hendrix and Moa, with tiny modifications by Jordi Muñoz that allows control an extra failsafe multiplexer.
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THIS WEEK IN AEROSPACE

Posted by Jack Crossfire on December 11, 2009 at 10:30am

There it is. The coveted $3.30 14.7456Mhz crystal. With that & a small bugfix installed, the C328 works perfectly at 115200, the pictures stream continuously from the microcontroller & we're up to XBee lockups.Even 1 way communication locks up in this high interference environment because the ACKs collide. Your only option is broadcast mode. With broadcast mode & 3 retries, you now have more errors but the Xbees don't lock up. The command to set the number of retries is ATRR & it's undocumented on the XBee 900.With the 900Mhz & 2.4Ghz running simultaneously we now see the huge difference in range. The 900Mhz dies at 300ft, much closer than the 2.4Ghz. This is with wire antennas. Since 900Mhz has always been more expensive than 2.4Ghz, don't expect to get 2.4Ghz range out of 900Mhz for $42. High gain antennas are required. Dual 2.4Ghz modules don't work well either.So that's $140 for 300ft .2fps 320x240 video. Ended up with this arrangement because 900Mhz was originally supposed to be for telemetry. The C328 was a cheap way to get preview video by recycling the 2.4Ghz radio. It's clearly a disaster compared to what people are doing with a $90 Ativa/Camileo & $80 Range Video radio.http://rcexplorer.se/page14/hdcv/hdcv.htmlvideo.tar.bz2This is the updated source code for the wireless camera system.This is our full motion aerial footage of the Rain Ramon XMas tree. The autopilot was programmed to always point towards the tree, but L1 GPS & GPS derived heading being what it is there was a lot of manual intervention. If the weather wasn't already closed in for the year, we would fly this at 1m/s with manual heading & time lapse it to get more accuracy.Heading from the magnetometers & accelerometers back in the day was never very accurate either. Dynamic acceleration & local induction always made it approximate.& this is a segment from a very old flight showing a fast autonomous descent into downwash using the Marcy Maneuver.MARCY 1 VIDEO NOTESMain ideas for getting video out of Marcy 1 revolve around using 1 raster line of a chip camera like the TCM8230MD, but no data radio has enough bandwidth to do the job. So the best idea is to scan 1 raster line every several revolutions, stick with a photodiode for heading & use the rotation period to figure out where the rasterline was scanned. Accumulate rasterlines from many revolutions to construct an image.The camera would be read on a 2nd CPU. Data would be sent to the main CPU's UART & multiplexed on the main radio.MARCY 1 MISERY

So gEDA had the wrong footprint for an SSOP20 & we had to make a new ground station board. Fortunately it only requires remaking 1 side when your double sided boards are stacks of 1/32" boards.The PIC18F14K50 has USB & programming on the same pins, so in circuit programming is extremely slow without a bootloader & USB probably doesn't work with the programming header attached. You're looking at pogo pins & a jig.Since USB hasn't worked between this week's commutes, probably going to make the ground station radio a breakout board & use a chip with dedicated USB pins as the ground station CPU.

Flight computer ready.

MEET MARCY 2

While waiting for Marcy 1 parts to arrive from Thailand, started the Marcy 2 vehicle. She's planned as a backup indoor sonar demonstrator in case Marcy 1 doesn't work. The parts are all in apartment. Probably going to use the programming pins for PWM.She uses a no brainer 3 gyro, 4 PWM, 1 sonar autopilot. Could have just recycled Vika 2's autopilot but all our indoor vehicles need 900Mhz radio & sonar on the main board. Though capable of flying a tri rotor, Marcy 2 is planned as a tail sitter.The main problem is fabricating a tail sitter small enough to fit in a $1 million apartment.
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MatrixPilot 2.0 Released for UAV Dev Board

Posted by Ben Levitt on December 11, 2009 at 12:40am
What's New in MatrixPilot 2.0
  • Combines the functionality of MatrixNav and AileronAssist into a single firmware.
  • Supports navigation using both ailerons and rudder.
  • Increases the number of Radio Input channels (from 4 to 5), and Servo Output channels (from 3 to 6).
  • Supports controlling Delta wing and V-Tail airframes, in addition to Standard airframes with or without ailerons.
  • More responsive to switching between Manual, Stabilized, and Waypoint modes.
  • Supports using the new uBlox GPS for faster navigation responses.
  • Super-basic camera stabilization code.
  • Adds serial telemetry output in a variety of formats.
    • Supports telemetry output in our own UAV Dev Board format.
    • Supports telemetry output using an Ardupilot Ground Station compatible format.
    • Supports NMEA output to a Remzibi OSD.
During my reorganization of Bill's excellent code base, I've been focusing on making it more configurable, more maintainable, and more easily extendable. So hopefully progress on this project will continue to accelerate! We have a growing group contributing code and testing through our email list, and we suggest that you join the list if you are an active user of a UAV Dev Board!More info including downloads, a budding wiki, and our searchable subversion repository are available on our google code project page.And of course, giant thanks to Bill Premerlani for the awesome hardware, for providing such a strong software foundation, and for tirelessly answering all of my questions.
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