There's a long but not very illuminating cover article in Aviation Week's Business and Commercial Aviation this month on how UAVs will change civil aviation.
Best bit: "At the Quad-A [Army Aviation Association of America] meeting [in mid-April] in Texas, Sikorsky announced a '2-1-0' pilot concept, where you could have a choice of two, one or no pilots aboard their helicopters," he said. That "public statement" is validating what many UAV insiders have known for some time, "that optionally piloted aircraft can fulfill these functions."
... For example, Vos suggested, air taxi operators could potentially replace a copilot with automation and gain an extra fare seat — "a significant gain, a 33-percent seat-mile improvement in that you would go from three to four passengers in a five-seat airplane. In simplistic terms, you have within a domain of interest the ability to know every other airplane and what it is doing, and together with the proactive ATM and reactive anti-collision technology, it becomes safe to operate with automation."
I was amused by this paragraph
"In researching this report, we heard of studies by major cargo airlines involving optionally piloted freighters, supposedly crewed on
transoceanic flights by a single pilot, or none at all. We queried Federal Express on the subject and received a friendly but dismissive response from corporate spokesman Jim McCluskey, who said, "I'm in touch with our research people all the time, and I've never heard anything like that." Nevertheless, he said, he'd run it up the executive chain of command to see what came back. In a follow-up conversation a few days later, his tone had changed somewhat. "I have an official statement from the company concerning alleged studies of minimally piloted or pilotless air freighters," he said. "'FedEx is always interested in new technology that will help us improve service to our customers, but we do not disclose the nature of our research.'"
Two weeks ago I interviewed FedEx CEO Fred Smith on stage in New York at the Wired Disruptive Business conference. We talked a lot about UAVs. He's been looking at them closely for years (this is no secret, so I don't know why Aviation Week didn't know about it). Last year we posted here on his thoughts about why UAVs, especially flying wings that aren't compromised for human safety and comfort, would be more efficient for FedEx, and at the conference this month he talked about the possibility of a FedEx someday flying formations of aircraft, like a flock of birds, with only the leading one being manned.
Is a flock of robotic cargo aircraft led by a single pilot a radical idea? Not really, he said. Think of it like a train: the lead car is manned, and all the others are unmanned. They're connected mechanically, and the aircraft would be connected electronically, but it's basically the same idea. It's simply the most efficient way to move cargo. Read more…
Hey Guys! (meant in the most gender neutral of ways),
I have taken my first real step toward building a DIY UAV! This will be boring to most of you, but to someone as far behind the curve as I am, this is HUGE. This community has come so far, and in such a relatively short period of time, that autopilots for RC planes are almost plug-and-play. However, I am determined to learn the basics of process control before moving on to an autopilot. After all, that's where you had to be a little over a year ago to even consider a DIY Drone.
I didn't start out with a LEGO Mindstorms, like this site's founder did, but I did get a Parallax BASIC Stamp Discovery Kit, which I believe was his next step. I don't plan to attempt to make an autopilot out of this controller--it's just for learning.
Now, I want you to pretend that the green LED to the right of the resistor (that's a 470 ohm resister, by the way) in the above photo is blinking once per second. I did that! Yes I did.
I'l like to say "stay tuned," but my projects tend to span years it seems. Maybe I can speed things up this time.
Tonight we'll do podcast #26, 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 8:00 PM PST not our usual 9:00PM PST time (since our guest is a few timezones ahead of us) and will probably go about 40 minutes.
As always you can subscribe to the podcast here. Tonight's livecast will be recorded and available as a podcast by Tues of the next week.
Read more…3D Robotics
The new PixHawk quadcopter controller board has some serious horsepower onboard! From the team's post:
"Its two Intel Core 2 DUO 1.86 GHz cores run only at 10% CPU usage with our competition software. The system has been mainly designed for future Computer Vision on Micro Air Vehicles research in PIXHAWK at the Institute of Visual Computing of ETH Zurich. We will use it to localize the MAV with pure onboard processing based on natural features. The current working state uses artificial features to localize.
Regarding our competition entry, we now reached a state where our PIXHAWK Cheetah ALPHA system not only hovers autonomously with no wireless video transmission using ARTK / computer vision, but also starts, lands and follows waypoints while detecting objects along the path. We're now optimizing the system to make sure it works fine in the competition itself. Part of these efforts is to build BRAVO, which has an optimized frame and electronics design and thus reduces the all-up weight from 1200g to about 900g."
Firstly I wish to convey my highest appreciation to all the developers and members of this community.
For those who do not know us, i wish to make a small explanation as why i am posting this.
Im my/our line of work, i/we have worked (and still do when required) on high end Mil spec UAV/UAS, and we wanted to do a mission not dissimilar, to what is required in real world situations.
This is the explanation of our comparisons, capability of the DIY Drones AP/IMU (for the amature market)
In the past we have been asked to over land flights, without the return trip for reconnaissance/info drop, info sec.
Given that due to a multitude of rules and regulations, for the DIY`er we had to plan this very carefully and get permissions to cross places and property, not belonging to us, and thankfullly the people involved, were very interested in this project and wanted to see success (another thank you to those who helped, by making this easier). We also did not want to risk the UAV community byt doing somthing very stupid that could end in tears for all, the loss of the aircraft, being the lowest priority.
So, with carefull planning we came up with a route where we take off from a field on our companies grounds, and the idea was to fly to a close friends/associates field, where the aircraft was to lioter until told to land.
With this in mind, we planned to take off, get to altitude, switch WP1, which was over our field, once WP1 hit, off it goes.
We had spotters with a back up system to command the aircraft if it went south, given that we were flying between two places over a valley, this was to our advantge as spotter 2 was at the half way point and at the highest point on the other side of the valley could see the take off point with binoculars.
Spotter 1 could see the aircraft with another back up system at 1/3rd distance, take off point in view at our side of the vally.
MISSION:
So take off was performed, Auto hit, telemetry comming down to the car with GCS in nice and strong.
as soon as WP1 hit....off she went....wobbled a little at WP2 as cross winds were quite strong....(at this point i was running for the car (i wasnt driving just incase anyone wants to jump on me!!) as it was on its mission and doing well).
In radio contact with spotter 1 all was good, and telemetry was confirming this. As we exited the field it was was already clossing towards WP3, so i told my driver (asked nicely, as it was my wife :~)) to get to spotter 1 position, but as the aircraft was moving quickly and was already passing spotter 1 to keep going to spotter 2, all telemetry was confirming the feed back from spotter 2 now as it was about to pass him.....we then decieded to go striaght to landing point...
for me telemetrt dropped out 2 times for about 3 secs when we passed throught the woodland head, spotter 2 was confirming that it was dead on target. when we got to the landing points...the telemetry was telling me that the aircraft was liotering over head.....AND IT WAS!!!!!!!
So...in conclusion.....we did a 3 mile flight with no visual interaction from the primary pilot, in full view of spotter 1 and 2 just incase anything went wrong...
I NEVER saw the aircraft from WP1 to Lioter at WP7, but telemetry confirmed the flight.
In conclusion, to do this kind of flight we (in the past have relied on high end Autopilots with huge $/£ value attached) and NOT had this kind of success the first time attempted.
I would like to also point out that this the result of about a years work, from our end, and much much more combined from the community.
Specs for those interested:
AP - Ardupilot 2.6 with shield removed for this flilght.
IMU - IMV V2 with 1.7 code.
Telemetry link - Xbee pros x 3, 1 AP side, 1 GCS/laptop side, 1 ground station with spotter 2
Mil spec serial link for flight controls and AP switching (40km range)...(stolen out of a high end UAS for insurance reasons)
Flycam1 nailed to side (but crapped out 2 mins in - Grrrrrrrrrr!)
Twin-star with 2 x 2300kv motors with 5ah 3s cells (complete over kill, only used 2ah for flight)
back up 1800 3s pack for APtelem.
AUW 2.8kg
Other parts added to system, 4 sets of bicycle clips for trousers as fitted to all pilots and spotters, this was 10 minutes of abject fear for all of us.
Another thank you to all who took the time out of thier saturday to prep, re-prep, test, spot, and drive for me.
Closing thoughts....
The flight was flawless, never missed a beat,flight was direct and precise. There was no reason for fear or worry.
We had done our prep (many, many times before flight), the developers, designers adn contributors had done a magnificent job!
And in a no small was i feel very smug, that after hundreds of hours of personal work on tuning, testing, tuning, changing, tuning, testing.......its nice to NOT be wrong for once! :~)
Aurora Flight Science's prototype VTOL Skate folds up real small (see below). From the official site:
"Aurora’s Skate UAS merges the simplicity and endurance of a fixed wing platform with the maneuverability
and mission flexibility of a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL)
asset. Independently articulating motor
pods allow the Skate UAS to rapidly transition between vertical
and horizontal flight. Transferring from
hovering to wingborne flight increases the endurance and range
of the system to levels characteristic of
a fixed wing platform and far beyond those of a traditional VTOL
asset. The thrust vectoring provided by
the motor pods also enables extreme maneuverability allowing the
Skate UAS to fly both vertically and
horizontally indoors, enabling rapid navigation of cluttered
environments such as city streets or inside
buildings."
NightFlyyer has some great flight and build videos for the new NitroPlanes 98" Reaper (which is supposed to start shipping again on 7/15 if you're backordered, as I am).
Other videos are below and embedded in the comments (thanks Morli--I don't know why I couldn't find the embed codes before!)
I have a quick beta of the MediaTek GPS parser for Ardupilot 2.6. Quick caveat - I don't actually have this module in my hands yet! I just modified Jose Julio's parser to match what 2.6 needs and read the data sheet on the new protocol. So, if someone who has the new modules could try this out and let me know if you are getting the right values, I'd appreciate it!
- maximum speed over 200Km/h. In the attached log file you can see, at line 587, H ground speed 53.06m/sec (191Km/h), M estimated airspeed 61.59m/sec (221Km/h). I have several flight logs with ground speed over 55m/sec
- acceleration at launch 0-100 <2.75sec. You can see it in the attached log file, considering that the plane is launched at line 370 and reaches 28.6m/sec (102Km/h) at line 381. Telemetry refresh is at 4Hz.
Here's one of the first test flights of the ArduCopter quadcopter setup, from team leader Ted Carancho. Try doing that with a Parrot AR.Drone!
This is using the ArduPilotMega hardware (APM board and IMU shield) on the original AeroQuad platform. The ArduCopter platform is in final design tweaks before it goes into production. The merger of the AeroQuad and ArduPilot Mega software is going well and a public beta is probably a few weeks away.
Testing Item: 1.Kalman filter for attitude estimate. 2.900MHz,2W RF datalink.
Although the sensor board not be modified for GPS and airspeed sensor. but I have tested the attitude estime via Kalman filter and RF datalink first. It's sad that I forgot take DV to record it. Orz
The RF made in Taiwan is stable and higher data rate that CL4790.(I have both). But It need specific command to sent data. It is not suitable for general purpose. http://diydrones.ning.com/video/kalmanestimate-1
Introduction I am acquiring a Multiplex Easy Star to learn to fly, and to work on a UAV build. This blog post highlights my proposed configuration, which is to be incrementally upgradeable
I plan to split up my project into five parts:
Learn to fly,
Fly with a camera payload (just for fun),
Fly manually with sensors, a data logger, and maybe a camera,
Use logged data to set up an autopilot, and try turning control over to the autopilot.
Repair plane and return to step 3.
I plan to order parts to minimally accomplish the first two goals, and to hopefully have enough room to add sensors.
I have a budget of $500 to start with. This has to include AMA/club membership, airplane, electronics, IMU, autopilot, et cetera.
I would like the plane to carry a payload that includes an IMU, an Ardupilot Mega, a Remzibi OSD or GPS, and a camera.
Lots of Miscellaneous Questions -- here's one to start with: Q: The ESC has a motor ESC output and a 5V output for my servos/receiver. What do I do if I want a second battery for the servos and receiver?
Stage 1 Parts List:
Easy Star ARF ($122):
Radio -- Futaba 6-channel (eBay)
Undecided Battery -- Upgrade-compliant LiPo?
Undecided Battery -- Heavy, non-upgradeable NiMH?
Already have NTSC camera, Airwave A/V Tx/Rx modules (634 and 630)
Summary There's my proposed configuration (including the undecided bits) -- I plan to meet my local club (SGVRL) to learn about flying on the local field, and later I can get a little better informed about my choices of battery before I jump in. Once I can fly, and fly with a payload, I'll pick out an IMU to play with. Read more…
It's the National Ignition Facility, the most powerful laser in the world. $4 billion. 500 Terrawatts. Enough power to feed 413,223 time machines. It requires 5 hours between each 4ns laser firing to cool down.
It was too windy to get very high. Only got 1 shot at 400ft. Angle of attack got to the abort limit where GPS could be lost & conventional control laws don't work.
Next, it was back over Pillar point.
Can't go very high in fog.
Finally, flew up over Napa again & for the 1st time, didn't crash. The wind in this area was the highest she ever flew in. Saw pretty insane angles of attack. GPS reception was real lousy. The video was made from several flights with the camera at different angles. 3 fans of freedom on the wing made strange noises in the wind.
Noted 2 anomalies in the video: a rubber band came off the camera & radio dropouts caused several pitch ups. Got 1 in the video. Aft propeller was scraping something when it hit yaw limits.
Looking over the lwneuralnet sourcecode again, the net_begin_batch, net_train_batch, & net_end_batch functions are basically the definition of backpropagation through time with obscure wording.
The neural network is recurrent but not being trained that way. Was always a bit stumped on how to train a recurrent network to optimize its own flying. They only know how to recall ideal answers. In the past, fed tables from PID equations.
1 way is to just randomly change weights & select better performing networks over long periods of time. Maybe have a 2nd network be an emprical model of the flight characteristics. Then there's taking the times when it hit the right position & training off those.
Well, the only way we see this commissioned turkey going autonomous now is ground based machine vision. Even then, it's not going to be stable enough to fit indoors. A ground camera can sense roll. The magnetometer can sense pitch. Sonar would still be needed for position.
Golf course grass on the UAV? It happens to the best of us, just like marriage, death, & taxes. Autonomy without attitude sensing isn't going so well again. Her neural network was overloading her CPU.
Today MatrixPilot controlled three more autonomous flights. All three flights were executed with the transmitter turned off. The picture above is the track of the first landing. It was aiming for the midpoint between the two fields, along a line that connects the centers of those two circles.
Recently I posted three flights of my GentleLady flying with MatrixPilot running on a UAV DevBoard, but I was not able to take a video at that time. The weather cleared today, so I thought I would get three more flights, this time with the EasyStar, and with a video camera documenting the hands off takeoffs and landings. This time, since I had the video camera as proof that the plane was able to take off again after each landing, I cycled the power on the plane between flights, but all three flights were with the same battery.
The first flight was just a test flight, without the video being recorded. Wouldn't you know it, it was the best of the three. Here is the GoogleEarth kmz file of the first flight: LOG00080.kmz. It includes waypoints, attitude information, wind estimation, and the track. You can animate the flight to re-create it, using the GoolgeEarth animation tool.
The following is a picture of the track of the first flight.
The second flight was the first flight that was captured on video. It was the most interesting of the three flights because it includes a missed approach. The plane was coming in high, and it looked to me that it might land on the busy highway to the northwest of field, so I cycled the power on the transmitter on and off to reset the controls. The plane then started all over again through the pattern, with the transmitter off, this time making a successful landing. Here is the kmz file: LOG00083.kmz The following is the track of the landing:
The third flight was executed immediately after the second flight. Here is the kmz file: LOG00084.kmz Here is a picture of the landing:
The third landing was actually right at the edge of the field. The plane came to rest against a fence post, but there was not any damage done.
The target for each landing was the point midway between the centers of the two fields. The distances between the landing point and the target for each flight were:
Flight#1: 34 meters
Flight#2: 38 meters
Flight#3: 80 meters
I will leave it up to the judges which flights to include in the average. Only two flights are needed for the contest, but it is not clear to me which ones qualify:
Flight#1: "clean flight", but no video
Flight#2: autonomous takeoff, manually commanded landing abort, then a complete autonomous flight. video recorded.
Flight#3: "clean flight", landed short. Bumped into a fence post, but no damage.
Here are three more videos. The quality is much better, my son, Brian, took most of it. I was not going to publish them, because they were from an unsuccessful flight. But now that I think about it, I think you would enjoy them more, watching me make a "rooky" mistake.
Here is what happened...on the day of my first few autonomous flights, I did not get video for the first 3 flights, dead batteries in the video camera.
So, later on in the day, armed with fresh batteries, I decided to try again. This time I took my son, Brian with me to help take the videos. You will see him. We thought it was fitting for him to finally appear, since he was the one who got me started in this hobby. If it were not for him, I would be doing something else instead of diydrones. Just in case there is any confusion about who is who, I am the good looking one, he is the young one.
Between the time of the first flights and when we got back to the field, the wind direction had shifted. We would now be taking off and landing with the wind. Bad idea. I knew better. But I really wanted to get some video, so I fooled myself into thinking that, although the wind was in the wrong direction, it was not too strong. Wrong!!
So, we gave it a shot. Here is the video. Things were going fine until final approach. It was landing with the wind, coming in high and fast. I could see it was going to go long. I had to make a fast decision. The camera was rolling, and I was determined to get my video. So, I let the plane try for an automatic go around. It reached the landing waypoint, powered back up, turned toward the trees, and started to climb. It almost cleared the trees. Almost...
If you listen, you can hear the plane smack into the tree at the end. Brian says it is the sound of wood embracing wood. Oh, and cover your ears at the end, I never imagined I would ever publish this one:
After the GentleLady smacked into the tree, Brian and I walked down to see what we could see....It was way up in the tree, about 60 feet up.
Brian is an avid climber, I bought him a membership in an indoor rock climbing club, so he volunteered to climb up and fetch it. It wasn't easy, but he did it. He went up as high as he could, he was still about 10 feet too low. With a GentleLady, the wing is held on with rubber bands, which had popped off. Brian shook the tree, the wing finally shook loose and fell. But the tree had a firm grip on the tail, so Brian climbed up another 10 feet to fetch the rest of the plane. Here is what he looked like 60 feet up in the tree:
The next question was what to do next. Brian vetoed the idea that we would try to complete the flight. It turned out the motor was running when the GentleLady landed in the tree, it was burned out. So, how to get the plane down? The only way was to throw it, as near as we could see. Brian was not signing up to climb down with the plane in one hand. Ever thoughtful, he took out the electronics first, and then dropped it straight down. It landed in the low branches of the tree. Here is the final step of the rescue:
Aside from the burned out motor, there was not much damage to the GentleLady. A new motor, a couple of drops of glue, she was out flying again the next day.
I finally decided to join the community with my first post, enjoy.
My work started with great inspiration of the 6.th round of the T3 contest, where the task is to simulate a flight, writing DIY Drones. While the description of the open loop, nor the closed loop simulation did not include any real sensory inputs, I decided to setup a small test scenario on my desktop. I was not happy about how the simulation of the GPS data was performed either. From the beginning my plan has been to replace the thermopiles with a accelerometer, to reduce the price but also for simplicity. Notice that this is not the IMU board, merely an accelerometer which return the same information as the thermopiles.
The objective of my setup is to fool the autopilot into thinking it is flying for real, and not just using a simulation on the Ardupilot. For this I need to create a setup which tilts the accelerometer in a realistic manner. Create a GPS simulator for the Ardupilot, to fool it into believing that it receives real GPS data.
First on the hardware. The test setup consist of:
- An Ardupilot board
- An accelerometer
- An Arduino Deicimila
- And a servo
The accelerometer is placed on the servo. The servo is controlled by the Deicimila. The Deicimilia board receives input from the Ardupilot board, to output to the servo. The Ardupilot read the roll and pitch from the accelerometer (which simulates a roll with thermopiles).
Second I need to simulate where the plane is going by creating the appropriate GPS data. This took some time, but I succeeded by reversing the code from the Ardupilot, and reading some documentation of the Sirf Binary Protocol. The result is a small application written in Java, which reads of the roll and tilt, and produces a binary string containing latitude, longitude, altitude etc., which is sent back to the Ardupilot board. And it actually works. By running the real autopilot code the board turns on the blue LED, to indicate that it receives good GPS data.
The result is a (from my point of view) test of the real autopilot software, and I discovered some bugs in the code, which I will describe some times later. I will also create a detailed description of how to interpret the binary data of the GPS modules, if anybody is interested.
Please comment, and I will elaborate on any missing parts.
It's been up for a while, but if you haven't checked out the website, here it is:
Mission Statement:
"The mission of the Congressional Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Caucus is to educate members of Congress and the public on the strategic, tactical, and scientific value of UAVs, actively support further development and acquisition of more capable UAVs, and to more effectively engage the civilian aviation community on UAV use and safety.
As members of this Caucus, we:
Acknowledge the overwhelming value of UAVs to the defense, intelligence, homeland security, and the scientific communities;
Recognize the urgent need to rapidly develop and deploy more UAVs in support of ongoing operations;
Work with the military, industry, NASA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and other stakeholders to seek fair and equitable solutions to challenges created by UAV operations in the U.S. National Air Space (NAS);
Support our world-class industrial base that engineers, develops, manufactures, and tests UAVs creating thousands of American jobs;
Support policies and budgets that promote a larger, more robust national security UAV capability."
