I stumbled upon this and thought others may think it's interesting as well...
Who knew the SP guys had competitions where they race around a triangle pattern of GPS coordinates? View results on Google Earth, get addional details from the plane to the ground station... Lots more.
Sounds fun but it's a little pricey.
The equipment seems like it would be very easy to adapt to UAVs...
For additional details check the link below.
We had a full house of university leaders yesterday at the FIRST Robotics Championship for our planning/brainstorming meeting on a potential indoors aerial robotics competition. We opened with Dean Kamen, the founder of FIRST (and famed inventor of things like the Segway) describing the opportunity for a next level competition for university students (shown above). Like a "NCAA" league to go with the "Little League to High School" model that FIRST now covers (apologies for the American analogies!).
Vince Wilczynski from the Coast Guard Academy, Steve Barker from HiTechnic and I presented some options, and Jordi and I demoed Blimduino and the Parrot AR.Drone.
The general takeaway from the meeting, based on the advice from the university leaders: they love the idea of a FIRST-sponsored aerial robotics competition, but that it has to be really cool to draw sufficient participation from the students. Many of them are engineers and the range of available projects to them in undergraduate and graduate school these days is pretty amazing, from cars to other bots, so the platform we choose has to have a high "wow" factor.
I suspect what that will mean is that we'll steer the college-level competition towards quadcopters (possibly in combination with ground rovers) and push the blimps more towards high school classes and competition. All the more reason to move ahead with our Parrot AR.Drone UAV conversion board...
And look what Jordi and I found in an alley outside the Georgia Dome on the way home:
This is interesting...
I had a couple of very brief flights with my slightly modified ArduPilot 2.6 code this evening.
I only had the chance to do a couple of passes in fly by wire mode, but the initial results are promising.
Still some gain tuning to do, but this isn't bad for a first attempt.
In the plot below:
Blue line is bank angle
Red line is pitch
Green is heading.
Blue DOTS indicate times when the Ardupilot was in Fly By Wire mode.
As you can see I'm getting oscillations of ~5 degrees around zero. Time for some gain tuning.
More importantly, I do think I am having range issues with the Ardupilot. The antenna down range test before the flight was not quite as good as I'm used to, however I decided it was safe to try. During the flight I did have a few glitches while in Manual mode, so I'd like to improve my range test results to try to clear those up.
Time to clean up my wiring a little. As you can see it's a bit of a rats nest right now.
Tom
In case it is useful to anyone, here is my code for controlling the 4th channel through the Ardupilot board.
The main thing that stumped me for a while is you need to change timer2 from CTC mode to Normal mode. The default Ardupilot code has Timer 2 in CTC mode which resets the counter every time the throttle compare interrupt is captured. To drive two channels you need to be in Normal mode allowing the timer to go all the way to 255 before resetting.
Channels 3 and 4 to have noticable more granularity than the first two channels (as expected), but within this granularity, the movement is nice and reliable. In the linked video, you can see that when being controlled by the ardupilot the rudder motion is slightly more jerky.
I also added an extra flight mode to my code called SERVO_TEST. When in servo_test, the main loop skips any sort of navigation or stabilization, and simply passes the radio inputs through to the servos. I did this so I could get a feel for how well my servo code was working.
I hadn't seen any code on the site for channel 4 actually integrating into an Ardupilot software load, so I thought I would post mine..
My pin assignments are as follows:
pinMode(2,INPUT); //- Aileron in
pinMode(3,INPUT); //- Elevator in
pinMode(8,OUTPUT); //- Throttle out
pinMode(9,OUTPUT); //- Elevator out
pinMode(10,OUTPUT); //- Aileron out
pinMode(11,OUTPUT); //- Rudder out
pinMode(12,INPUT); //- Rudder in
pinMode(13,INPUT); //- throttle in
(Note that I'm using RADIO_TYPE 0, so I have no code in the RADIO_TYPE 1 sections).
Below is a video from my shop of the rudder motion, both in MANUAL mode (straight from the radio) and in SERVO_TEST mode (radio read by the ArduPilot and Passed through untouched).
(pic also from BotJunkie)
BBC video here. (Sorry, but they don't allow embedding. Ugh.)
Check out Nima's two profiles, http://diydrones.com/profile/NimaKayvan and http://diydrones.com/profile/NimaK, as well as the Project Andromeda website: http://www.projectandromeda.com.au/
Also I forgot to mention last month was our first month to surpass 100GB of downloads. Crazy!
Today I flew my ParkZone Stryker with an AttoPilot IMU for the first time. The wind was 20mph and the loiter circle was 100m. I did not have a WP file set for today as I was checking my stabalization tuning. Some very minor changes needed but it really turned out extreemly well. I will fly some WP files tomorrow.
The following plots are:
Roll vs Roll target
Pitch vs Pitch target
Airspeed vs Airspeed target
Wind and Airspeed vs Heading
These birds fly rather well.
Chris
You can find product details at: http://www.01mech.com/supermodified
I copy the following from the site:
| Attribute | Benefit |
| PID Speed / Position control | Accurately adjust your servo’s rotation speed according to your project’s needs |
| Profiled position/speed control | No more jerky motions on your robots, only smooth transitions from one setpoint to thenext |
| Velocity feedback | Feedback on the exact speed of your motor – produce more efficient algorithms and better overall robotbehaviour |
| Incremental position feedback | Feedback based on a 0.08° increments! Store your position in EPROM and recover it afterRESET |
| Absolute position feedback | Know your robot’s joint positions straight after controller initialisation. Store your position in EPROMand recover it after RESET |
| Additional I/Os | Use your Supermodified to also control other devices with 4 available GPIOs onthe Supermodified™ MCU board |
| Additional analog inputs | Get feedback from analog sensors with 4 analog inputs on the Supermodified™ MCU board |
| Ambient temperature measurement | Avoid overheating the ‘guts’ of the servo by knowing ambient air temperature |
| Current feedback | Avoid excessive stresses and easily calculate torque-demand on your servomotor during operation by knowingthe motor’s current consumption |
| Bus interfaces (I2C, RS485) | Everything is on the comms bus! Up to 127 (wt. I2C, TWI interface), 248 (wt. RS485interface) Supermodified™ nodes can be controlled by a single host |
| Form Factor | Control electronics, absolute feedback element, motor drive electronics, motor and gearbox now fitinside a servo. No more messy boards and wires |
Google has recently scanned and posted all of Popular Science's back issues (and they go WAY back), and there are some gems in there from the early days of autopilots. One of them is this, which describes an autopilot the legendary Maynard Hill (yes, the guy who flew a hobby UAV across the Atlantic in 2003) built that uses minute electrostatic differences with altitude to create an analog autopilot.
Here are some other pictures from the article, but you should really read the whole thing. Anyone know what went wrong with this approach and why he abandoned it?
