A Swiss airplane, powered by solar energy has left the Swiss village Payerne for it's first international flight to Brussels in Belgium. The trip will take around 12 hours. You can follow flight control here.

The Solar Impulse combines the wingspan of a commercial airliner with the weight of a car. The wings are covered with solar cells that provide the electric motors with power. The inventors of the Solar Impulse wrote history last year when they circled for 24 hours over Switzerland, by only using solar energy. The team has planned to fly around the world within 2 years.

This is just a quickie before I go to bed.

Those with a Futaba 6EX will know the toggle don't always feel right when you are flying a plane well as I use both my extra channels for mode switching I figured enough was enough and put them together. I took off the back and traced the wires back to a PCB point. Unsoldered, swapped over and resoldered them, 5 minutes and done.

Some quick measuring and my Tesco A4 label sheets were put into action on the top so everything is labelled properly still. The picture below shows the two points which connect to the switch marked above.

Disclaimer: Neither I or DIYdrones take NO responsibility for any damage you cause to your equipment try to do this or something like it to your own equipment. You break it, its your fault.

I hinted that the DIY Drones team had been working with Google on an Android-compatible RC interface board. Now that I/O is over, I can give the details. We're calling it the "PhoneDrone board for Android", and 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.

Note that the pictures here are of an early prototype and some branding has been photoshopped out, pending final silkscreen approval.

Specs:

• 8 Input&output PWMs
• Native USB host master (MAX3421)
• Native USB slave (Atmega32-au)
• Arduino Compatible
• Atmega2560 as main controller
• Atmega32-u2 as FTDI substitute and PPM encoder
• Three spare serial ports to communicate with other boards (including APM)
• Build-in 5V-2A switched power regulator (input range 6V - 36V)
• Build-in 3.3V LDO power regulator 
• Android TM compatible... 
• All Atmega2560 pins exposed.
• High quality PCB is ROHS/lead free, Gold immersed. 
• Dimensions: 4" x 1.6"...

Bottom:

Tactical UAV design earns cadet team multiple awards

Mike Strasser, West Point Public Affairs

WEST POINT, N.Y., May 11, 2011 — Soldiers sometimes operate in remote locations where maps are either outdated, or lack adequate resolution. Mission success could weigh heavily on whether a unit relies on low-quality resources or waits indefinitely for higher-quality imagery.

A team of West Point cadets worked on this problem and developed a senior capstone design project which garnered three awards in recent weeks. Class of 2011 Cadets Mike Weigand, Anthony Rodriguez, John Rollinson and James Raub built STITCH, or “Supplying Tactical Imagery to Command Headquarters,” a low-cost, lightweight, fully autonomous unmanned aerial system.

http://www.suasnews.com/2011/05/5497/tactical-uav-design-earns-cadet-team-multiple-awards/

All hand flown

mwc hexa - fun flying no2 from warthox on Vimeo.

'UAS 2020: Looking to the Future'

The Red River Valley Research Corridor is holding its 5th

Annual Unmanned Aviation Systems Action Summit  at the

Alerus Center, Grand Forks, North Dakota, on June 2-3, 2011.

It will focus on developing and strengthening the Nation’s

burgeoning unmanned systems industry and advancing
the call to develop responses to some of the pressing

issues, challenges, and threats.

This diagram shows the difference between bearing, relative bearing and heading.......all in degrees magnetic.

Heading is not always the direction an aircraft is moving. That is called 'course'. Heading is the direction the aircraft is pointing. The aircraft may be drifting a little or a lot due to a crosswind.

Bearing is the angle in degrees (clockwise) between North and the direction to the destination or nav aid.

Relative bearing is the angle in degrees (clockwise) between the heading of the aircraft and the destination or nav aid. 

    Here's a link showing an aircraft on a heading of 350° with a relative bearing to the station of 145°.
The station's bearing is 135° from North based on where the aircraft is, but since the aircraft is heading 10° left or West of North, that angle must be added to 135°.

The aircraft would have to turn 145° to the right to be pointing at the station.
http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Reports/rose.gif

• Hook a GPS to GCS.
• GCS calculates GPS difference.
• GCS transmits GPS correction over xbee MAVLINK connection
• ArduCopter Stabilize mode gets very fine resolution.

Details here: http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2011/05/idea-ardupilot-differential-gps.html

DGPS background: http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/CORS

More coolness from the Vicon motion capture room at ETH Zurich:

From IEEE Spectrum:

The quadrotor is not doing everything by itself. It's getting help from the environment, an enclosed space called the Flying Machine Arena, which is equipped with multiple motion capture cameras. The researchers devised algorithms to transform the vision data from the cameras into control commands for the quadrotor. The machine can hover in place or it can follow pre-programmed trajectories. Manual control is also possible using a "set point tracking" device.

Hehn and D'Andrea, an IEEE Fellow and co-founder of Kiva Systems, which develops warehouse automation robots (disclosure: he's also a member of IEEE Spectrum's editorial advisory board), describe the project in a paper, "A Flying Inverted Pendulum," presented today at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), in Shanghai.

Exceptional students majoring in computer science, electrical engineering or similar are invited to apply for an internship at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) UAS Program. Interns participating in this program will work closely with members of the research staff on a fast paced research project. One paid internship of up to six months is available. Please submit resume to:  cuasinternship@parc.com

Responsibilities:

-Influence the development of a novel UAS platform

-Participate in the project from planning to field testing

-Explore publication or patent potential

Requirements:

-Graduate student in CS, EE or similar field preferred; qualified undergraduates will be considered

-Strong C++ experience

-OpenCV computer vision experience or similar

Here is the blog created by mine team member Anugrah along with me for our final year project "SURYAAN".Infact we were not able to complete the AUTONOMUS part with in the specified time of approx 10 month but we had completed UAV...a aeromodel along with CAMERA and GPS installed on it giving its location via Xbee to HK GCS.we are very helpfull to HK for providing us the guidence and DIY drones who help me to make up my basics which were so poor earlier.

well we will continuogspe working on the autonomus part but without guidence it is quite tough when you are making your own auto-pilot kit with your full programming.
wish me luck.

www.suryaanuav.blogspot.com

Well we are part way through out project on an autonomous quadrotor platform.

The first two videos are of the first flights. The third is the first crash (*sigh*).

Flight 1:

I am piloting this one and making sure it works before trying anything too extreme.

Flight 2:

Bryan is flying this one and he is testing out the performance of the ArduCopter

Crash 1:

I was piloting this one, and something just failed, cause is still unknown.

We managed to have a nice sunny day to fly the quads in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens.

The next step is to have it taking off and landing autonomously using the gps and pressure sensors. After that, get wifi-data.

We shall keep you posted!!

While iPhone remains closed to HW developers who aren't iHome or Belkin, Google is courting DIY innovation with Arduino and open hardware connectivity standards.

I'm sure there aren't lousy encryption chips or other obstacles in the way of hackers who want to hook up custom hardware to their Android device. I just wish Apple would get with it and give open access to their USB ports! 

Bravo Google!

Hi,

I couldn't resist to share the close-ups of our custom delivery of Pteryx PRO for AGROCOM Polska (precision agriculture consulting services).

This is most probably the only operational setup in the world that can do simultaneous mapping of both visible and full spectrum (including near IR) photos.

We have used mechanical triggering (scheduled automatically by the autopilot) that allows using different cameras with the same metal mount. The head is a part of Pteryx UAV and is made of kevlar+carbon fiber, it is also roll stabilised for guaranteed ground photo overlap.

Well, after a week busy at work (err, and running through Portal 2), it's back to the bench.

The second APM showed up, and this time I managed to solder the connectors on correctly.  That was a good feeling.

Got the IMU connectors on, hooked up the GPS and the magnetometer, and fired up the APM on the bench.  Ran several diagnostics successfully (using 2.0 Beta for now). Took  the numbers out of the GPS, plugged them into Google, and the little arrow was on my house. That was a great feeling.

Noticed that the magnetometer seems to oscillate around  ±8º ; don't know if this is a feature or something that is tweakable.  Time will tell. 

Next step is to put together the Quadcopter airframe, after which we get the joy of the first flights. Hope it will be less traumatic than my first flights in the 400-450 series helicopters.

Waiting on some connectors (Deans female) for the power distribution board so I can unplug and plug the ESCs rather than soldering/unsoldering them,  All my batteries use Eflite EC3 connectors, so I'll be getting a couple of EC3s as well.

Plans

My target for Block 1 is to have a stable platform which can "loiter" at a given position. This will involve the following steps, I think.

1. Manual flight, using my RC Tx to control the craft (hands-on).  Demonstrate that it will perform stable hover and low-speed level flight in the confines of my back yard.  Get some sense for the battery life, and try things like mounting two batteries in parallel.  See how badly the ESCs overheat (if they do).
2. Hands-off stable hover, under autopilot control.  Goal here is to get the craft to hover, maintaining altitude and orientation when I don't have my hands on the controls.   Program one of the channels in the Tx/Rx to get into and out of this mode.
3. Hands-off orientation changes.  Once I can maintain a stable hands-off hover, figure out how to turn 90 º to the left and right and back to an original heading
4. Return to starting point in autonomous stable slow fight. This involves:
   • Stable hands-off hover at starting point
   • controlled manual straight and level flight to some nearby point (line of sight, no obstructions, not too far)
   • Stable hover at far end point
   • slow level autonomous flight from "far end point" back to starting point
   • Stable hover at starting point
5. Ability to automatically self-land from a stable hover.

There should be enough programming, learning and tinkering there to keep me busy for a week month or two.

I'm also writing some Java code on the Mac to act as a base-station. When I get my XBees set up, I'll be taking real-time telemetry from the Coptermatic and ingesting it into some ground monitoring software. Idea here are to save the logs to a file in raw text form,   put up some sort of graphical displays using Graphite or similar, and possibly storing the log data in a MySQL database for later use.  Hey, complex solutions can be fun!

'll be posting some photos and (hopefully) flight videos next time.

Oh, to have a half-million-dollar Vicon motion capture system. Look at what you can do with it (in the lab)!

From IEEE Spectrum:

"The University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Lab, famous for those crazy quadrotors that can fly through windows and hula hoops, has been working on getting groups of the robots to fly together in formation. Just like with a formation of fighter jets, there's a leader robot in each squad along with several follower robots. The followers have just two jobs: follow the leader, and preserve the shape of the formation.

Being able to do this is all about communication, as Professor Nathan Michaeldiscussed today at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Shanghai. As he and fellow researchers Matthew Turpin and Vijay Kumar have discovered, the robots have to not just know exactly where they are, but they also have to broadcast that information to their neighbors to maintain the integrity of the formation. This processing is all done on each individual quadrotor, so there's no all-seeing computer watching everything and telling each robot where to go. The accuracy is impressive: 50 percent of the time the quadrotors are within a mere two centimeters of where they should be.

So what happens when some robots can't talk to each other? If a robot fails for some reason, it's able to bow out from the formation gracefully, and the other robots can move on without it, preserving the shape of the formation. You can see an example of this in the above vid. It's an important capability: part of the advantage of having a group (or a swarm) is that it can be resilient to individual failures, but to harness this resiliency, you need to not have one failure cause a disruption to the rest of the group."