Blogs

Pteryx UAV photo mapping from Krzysztof Bosak on Vimeo.

Full autonomous UAV flight with the ArduPilot/IMU on Cularis from Jean-Louis Naudin on Vimeo.

Total mission distance 2.3 km with 5 waypoints.

Setup:

- Electric Glider: Cularis from Multiplex

- ArduPilot firmware v2.7.4 JLN

- ArduIMU v1.6

- GPS Ublox

- Shield v2

- Battery: Lipo 3S1P 2500 mAh

- Engine: Brushless motor: Spitz 45

- Camera: Kodak ZX1 HD
by Jean-Louis Naudin on October 2010

http://diydrones.com/profile/JeanLouisNaudin

• Arducopter MP rev. 3

• Multipilot 1.0A http://code.google.com/p/lnmultipilot10/wiki/multiboard
  
• 3 Gyro ADXLrs 610
• BL-CTR 20 AMP i2c
• reciver graupner 1 wire PPM modificata.
• Diydrones Magnetometer HMC5843 con level shifter 3.3 volt 5 volt
• GPS Skytrack 65 Channel 10 HZ
• Sonar range until 6 metri.
• Barometer 20 cm until 1500 m .

• GoProHD Full HD CAMERA
  

• Xbeepro 2.4 Ghz

• Standard FOX Fiber Carbon Frame without enclosure and landing gear for testing.

Just FYI...

Excerpt from "President's Perspective," Model Aviation magazine, November 2010


FAA Ruling May Be Challenging to AMA

Things continue to move forward, albeit relatively slowly, with the FAA regulatory process for small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) that will have some collateral impact on model aviation.

AMA’s internal workgroup, comprising members with considerable experience representing a number of modeling disciplines, continues to draft an initial set of standards that we will present to the FAA. The purpose of these standards is to create a path in which model aviation enthusiasts may operate outside of the "default" set of regulations that were [proposed] to the FAA by an Aviation Rulemaking Committee (ARC) in March 2009.

Rich Hanson, AMA’s Government Affairs Representative, and the Safety Committee chairperson, Jim Rice, traveled to Washington in early September to meet with representatives from the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft Program Office (UAPO). The purpose of that meeting was to share with the UAPO the direction that we are taking with our standards and to ask for guidance to ensure that the form and format of our work was moving in the right direction.

The results of that meeting have raised some additional concerns for us. We have scheduled a follow-up meeting with UAPO manager Rick Prosek. This meeting will have taken place by the time this issue of MA reaches you. I will update you on the results of this meeting next month.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

Anderson covers all the questions you ever had about making flying robots, including safety and legal aspects. He also discusses risks in putting this technology in the wrong hands and some anecdotes of crazy projects coming out of the community."

Check it out here. And subscribe to hear all the podcasts, which cover loads of ground of interest to this community, from other UAV issues to basis research on AI and locomotion. It really is a must-listen production from a crack team of researchers at a top Swiss robotics lab. Highly recommended.

• tier structure - arduino == platform driver, android == command gateway, webgui == user interface
  
• as few soldering and custom parts as possible
• exclusively open source, and free software as far as possible (some might have forgotten - there is a difference)
  
• web-based (i really dont want to mess around with r/c electronics and reach and such)
• swarm-alike - each drone should be aware of all others, be able to communicate with each other and to help and replace each other (for example seamless drone replacement in POI mode)

Matrix Pilot Camera Targeting: Tree Test - Software Stabilized

Strategy: Have MatrixPilot / UAV DevBoard (UDB) point camera roughly in the right direction.

Take out the jitter movement using software stabilization.

The above flight was flown on a day with 10mph of wind, with a lot of turbulence (I included the landing in the video to show the turbulence).

1. The UDB is calculating its orientation 40 times / second using a 16 bit Direction Cosine Matrix

2. I use se Bill Premerlani's "High Bandwidth Dead Reckoning", which means MatrixPilot knows it's

absolute position 40 times / second, by integrating the accelerometers. The accelerometer positions are

corrected by allowing for the GPS delay and some of the GPS dynamics (GPS info arrives at least 1

seconds after the real event).

3. The camera code computes the target location from the above 40 times / second.

This guy knows how to rock that quad!

Motors: FC 28-22 1200kv

ESC : HK SS 25-30A

Props: 8 x 4.5

Late happenings at ArduCopter "Factories"...

Another milestone on releases, few weeks ago we had our first official Alpha software release and now saga continues..

It's been long and fast ride in past 6 months. It all started as a dream to create nice expansion for original ArduPilot electronics. Then Jordi and others created new even better and more compact electronics for IMU use, after that people started to create more and more their of flying devices. So finally we decided to take it to next level. Level of ArduCopter and it's full line of electronics, frames and other R/C equipment.

We on development group owe a bit thanks to the whole DIY Drones community and people who are playing key roles on it. Now we already have nice and rather well working ArduCopter software written for the latest hardware and well working fixedwing software so things are looking good on our users perspective. Sure there are still many things to develop, and new development happens every single day, maybe some of our users won't always see it but there are a lot of things done behind the scenes.

In totally on ArduCopter project it self we have around 20 people working with it, some as occasional commiters, some of us are more or less working as full time and some even all day around 7 days per week... Why, well we just like it a lot and we want to provide these good experiences to our users.

I should not need to tell that what we are trying to do here but let's say it anyways. Thing what we try to accomplish with ArduCopter and ArduPilots projects in generally is to create low cost and easy to use UAV platforms that can be extended easily to higher levels. We try to keep designs as simple as possible so people even with low mechanical skills would be comfortable to build them and enjoy of flying.

Naturally our platforms is not for everyone but at least we try to make it suitable for as many as possible. And you can be part of that process. So if you have any ideas just let us know. We are constantly looking new ideas and ways to do things.

ArduCopter KITs

Long waited time has come. We have been using hundreds of people to find all suitable parts and part providers for us, thousands of emails has been sent back and forth and now finally ArduCopter v1.0 release is at hand.

Also long waited prices for KIT's are here too. Our original goal was to create a multirotor platform with less than $1,000.00 USD, and yes Sir, we did it. Actually we did it way under of our first price goals. So here they finally are:

ArduCopter Quad v1.0 Full KIT price will be $499 USD
- ArduPilot Mega
- ArduPilot Mega IMU / OilPan
- MediaTek GPS
- Needed connectors for GPS and APM
- Motors (850kv), ESCs (20Amp), 10x45 Propellers
- Full Frame kit

You only need to add Radio/Receiver and battery to make it complete.


ArduCopter Quad v1.0 Frame KIT, $290 USD
- Full Frame kit
- Motors (850Kv), ESCs (20Amp), 10x45 Propellers

ArduCopter Quad v1.0 Frame itself $160 USD
- Just all frame parts

All frame KIT's have Fixed delivery price of $55 USD and it works most of countries. But due some countries can have high delivery costs, we will cover extras costs as long as they stay under 25%, if it goes more than that we might need to charge small extra for delivery. We are constantly looking better and more economic methods for deliveries.

Hexa and other frames will be available later after basic production is running properly on Quad frames. There also is going to be full range of extra accessories and spareparts for all frames.

Frame itself contains parts like in earlier Beta frame had plus some extras and upgraded parts based on our beta tester comments and proposals. Main changes are in Arches, Power PCB, MotorMount, New choices for arms, landing gear fins, spareparts and also some extra connectors are included on this new frame kit.


Originally we planned to have pre-orders and Asian/European orders under PhiFUN but due legal issues and taxation, we moved it to more official company to ensure that everything is done legally. So we are using Fah Pah Electronics new site that I have been building last week for all our deliveries. All PhiFUN operations has been moved under Fah Pah. (My working table is still on same place and full of tiny AC parts as always hahah).


After normal deliveries has started, ArduCopter KIT's and parts can be found from following shops:

http://store.diydrones.com (for US only)
http://store.jdrones.com (rest of the world)


There will be few local distributors, their names/locations will be announced later (edited to here)

Estimate to start deliveries is now on 1st week of November. Depending on how our Motor and ESC shipment is arriving from factory. We are keeping parts arrival records on our Wiki so check it out.

Now let's fill the world with ArduHappines :)


Cheers,
Jani / The headless ArduCopter man on Youtube ;)

Our IT guys found this in a closet. It's an old quadcopter that uses thermopiles rather than gyros for stabilzation. It's RC only, but it's got a big old webcam on a stalk. Like a Parrot AR.Drone from the dark ages!

The only identifying writing on the board says "Spectrolutions, 2004" and when you Google that it comes up with this site, which shows a very similar board with "Draganfly" markings. Maybe this is a prototype of an earlier version of the current DraganFly?

[Update: it looks like it is indeed a prototype of the DraganFly V, which came out that year. Here's a good pictoral history of that development]

Anyone out there have any experience with connecting a cellular modem to the ArduPilot Mega? My intent is to create greater/more reliable down/uplink range. If a radio modem has the capability, it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to think that a cell modem could.

JFK