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Boeing launches 3D camera

Posted by Gary Mortimer on March 11, 2010 at 12:59am
From a Boeing press release http://boeing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=1107

photon_3D_camera_th.jpg


ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., March 8, 2010 -- The Boeing Company [NYSE: BA] today announced it has begun offering a new, compact, energy-efficient camera that provides three-dimensional images for military and commercial applications.

Boeing Directed Energy Systems and wholly owned Boeing subsidiary Spectrolab have jointly developed the camera using their own research and development funding, and successfully tested it over the past two years by attaching it to mobile ground platforms and a Boeing AH-6 Little Bird helicopter. Equipped with advanced sensors that were developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory and transferred to Boeing under a teaming arrangement, the cube-shaped camera is one-third the size and uses one-tenth the power of most comparable 3-D imaging cameras.

"Our three-dimensional camera fits a lot of capability into a small package," said Nasser Karam, vice president of Advanced Technology Products at Spectrolab. "Its compact design and modest power needs will allow it to be deployed on a wide range of platforms, including unmanned aerial and ground vehicles that don't have much room or power to spare."

The camera, which Boeing can customize for each customer, has many potential uses, including mapping terrain, tracking targets and seeing through foliage. To create a 3-D image, the camera fires a short pulse of laser light, then measures the pulse's flight time to determine how far away each part of the camera's field of view is.

"The camera combines cutting-edge sensor technology with Boeing's advanced pointing and tracking solutions and real-time processing to provide our customers with highly integrated 3-D imaging payloads for ground, airborne or space-based applications," said Joseph Paranto, Growth lead for Directed Energy Systems in Albuquerque.

Boeing is currently integrating the camera into compact 3-D imaging payloads on unmanned aerial vehicles and will be testing that capability this spring. The team will also add 3-D video capability to the camera soon to complement its existing still-image capability.

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3D Robotics

Famous ABE lost at sea

Posted by Chris Anderson on March 10, 2010 at 4:29pm

A sad day for our underwater cousins:


"The ABE (Autonomous Benthic Explorer) has used its on-board acoustic transponders and five thrusters to scan the seafloor for over 15 years - locating, mapping, and photographing hydrothermal vents, volcanoes, and other features of the great deep. Marked with "NCC1701" due to its resemblance to Captain Kirk's ship, ABE has performed more than 200 missions collecting valuable data for researchers worldwide. But something went wrong last Friday on an expedition off the coast of Chile and ABE just stopped - nothing was ever heard again. No word yet on whether ABE can be located or recovered."
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T3

Testing the new ArduIMU Viewer and Ardu Groundstation with FLEXIPILOT

Posted by Krzysztof Bosak on March 10, 2010 at 4:23pm

Testing the new ArduIMU Viewer with FLEXIPILOT from Krzysztof Bosak on Vimeo.

Unfortunately ArduIMU Viewer is not accepting the protocol that ArduStation likes.The demonstration shows the look of both viewers,where to click on order to configure COM port and alsohow to setup the protocol with FLEXIPILOT.Observe a bug in the viewer making possible multiple creation of 3D cube.
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Gauging Interest: 4 Channel ESC for Brushless Motors (RS232/PWM/I2C + Atmel AVR's!)

Posted by Brett W on March 10, 2010 at 4:07pm
I am designing (and may soon produce) a 4 channel electronic speed controller (ESC) for brushless RC motors.

The Problem
It seems as though everybody who builds a quadcopter uses 4 individual PWM ESC's (that are often zip-tied to the rotor arms).
http://ng.uavp.ch/moin/UserCopters
http://quadcopter.wordpress.com/
http://scsuquadcopter2010.blogspot.com/
http://t413.com/news/category/quadcopter
http://vrhome.net/vassilis/2009/01/q...bly-completed/
etc...

Overall it's a bit messy and there are wires and small PCB's everywhere. Some people also convert their ESC's to receive I2C commands instead of PWM since it's faster and easier to pair with their flight controller.

The Solution
This is a 4 channel motor controller based on Atmel AVR's that can be controlled using serial, I2C, or even a standard PWM input. This is a single circuit board with 4 sets of 3-phase motor outputs. Each of the four segments on the board can power up to a 30A motor (so 120A max for the entire board). Each of the four segments is controlled INDIVIDUALLY (required for quadcopters).

In addition, the board can act as a master power management board for any other boards you hook into it. Your battery will plug into this controller (think Dean's connectors), and there will be regulated 3.3v and 5v outputs that can be used to power your flight controller or other circuit boards on your aircraft.

Possible Uses
Quadcopters! That's what this is designed for. That being said, this would work on practically any model that uses more than one brushless motor (4 motor electric planes maybe?).

Form Factor (roughly 4" square)
The board is designed to be a part of a low-height modular stacking system that I'm using for my quadcopter. I'm also developing an AVR-based flight controller (with full IMU) that can stack on top of this, as well as other add-on boards. There is a common communication bus between all boards stacked together. I can share more about this if anyone is interested (in either the modular form factor or the AVR-based flight controller board). The size of the board was made to fit the custom centerplates I'm having cut for my quadcopter.

Features
- 4 individual brushless motor controller channels on a single circuit board.
- Very fast update rate (using 20Mhz AVRs so there's a lot of room to spare!)
- Up to 30A per motor.
- Uses Atmel AVR's, so you can reprogram it as much as you like.
- Current limiting/feedback per motor (automatically reduces throttle if a particular motor exceeds the maximum current you've set - doesn't just shut the motor off like other ESC's).
- All surface mount components.
- Open source!
- Low-profile board (most likely less than 7mm thick).
- Serial/I2C digital communication/control.

Availability
I am only gauging interest at this point in order to determine if I should make extra boards to sell. If there is interest, I'll have extra PCB's made and assembled for anybody that wants one. I'm expecting to be able to sell them for around $120.00.

Are any of you interested?
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Flytron CompuFly USBtoPPM Interface Software v1.0 Released

Posted by Melih Karakelle on March 10, 2010 at 1:00am
Hi Everyone,

I just released new Open Source software for CompuFly USBtoPPM Interface,

compufly_software_1_0_s.png
This Software supporting all flight joysticks like Saitek ST290,

Software includes:
  • 7 channel control by joystick
  • Camera Pan/Tilt with HAD stricks and auto centering with one button press
  • Rudder control from joystick
  • Trottle control from joystick
  • Landing gear or any remote switch On/Off with buttonsixes
  • Trim/Reverse and EPA mixes from software
  • 1024 step servo position for each channels
  • Positive and Negative PPM selection
  • Channel output selection 1 to 10 channels
  • Futaba Square/Round, Hitec Round, ESky, 3.5mm Jack type Plugs Available


Software under GNU license, all developers welcome.


Product Link: http://www.flytron.com/56-compufly-u...converter.html
Download link: http://www.flytron.com/pdf/CompuFly.zip
USB Driver Link: http://www.flytron.com/pdf/CP210x_VC...K3_Vista_7.zip

56-205-large.jpg


Thanks for reading
Melih Karakelle
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The AeroQuad

Posted by David Ankers on March 9, 2010 at 9:30pm

I know this is not strictly a UAV but because this is centre of the universe for things Arduino flight related and there have been some very cool posts about Quads lately (it is also one of my passions), I thought I would post about an Open Source Arduino based Quad platform in case people are not aware of it.

I have heard of the project in the past but never really spent any decent time looking at it until today, it certainly looks very good and appears to fly very well. The website is http://aeroquad.info and it uses either the Arduino Duemilanove w/ Atmega 328 or the Arduino Mega.

One of the other reasons for posting this is I wonder how easy it would be to get the code to run on the upcoming ArduPilot Mega and utilising the ArduIMU?

The parts list, source code and loads of good information are on the site. Looks to be a very well run project.

UPDATE: Sorry, this has been posted before, however, I am very interested in the question of running this code on the upcoming ArduPilot Mega and using the ArduIMU as sensor inputs.

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Developer

Just another ArduPilot flight test... with on board & HD ground video, see tip stall recovery...

Posted by Mark Colwell on March 9, 2010 at 9:02pm

ArduPilot_251 flight test with AP Throttle control from Mark Colwell on Vimeo.


ArduPilot 251, ArduIMUv1, Shieldv1, uBlox, Elevon mixing on a Stryker II with onboard video and HD ground video, sorry no telemetry. Winds 10-15 with some gusts to 20mph. Tip stall due to low throttle center speed setting and maneuvering in Fly-By-Wire mode. Next flight I climbed to safe altitude then landed in Stabilize mode with throttle cut off. Landing was smooth in gusty conditions! Next time testing with latest rev and more power for a longer flight, maybe fly to to some waypoints too...

ArduPilot 251 test flight with AP Throttle control HD ground video from Mark Colwell on Vimeo.



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3D Robotics

Spam fighting on DIY Drones

Posted by Chris Anderson on March 9, 2010 at 7:04pm
If we do our job right, most members here will have no idea how much spam we fight here every day. Normally it's not too much, just a dozen members who have spam links in their profile. But over the last week, DIY Drones, like most of the other networks hosted on the Ning platform, has been hit by the biggest botnet attack we've ever seen, with hundreds of fake member accounts being created every day to post Canadian pharmaceutical ads. The graph above, from this article, shows the rise of these botnet attacks in recent weeks.

The reason members shouldn't know anything about this is because of the heroic work of your 30 administrators and moderators, who have been manually banning these accounts and deleting the posts before they're published (that's why we moderate all posts). The posts can come at the rate of dozens per hour, so this is a big job; I just wanted to publicly thank the moderators, especially Morli and Thomas Coyle for their tireless work in fending off these bots.

Just to give you and idea of what they're dealing with, here is about 30 minute's worth of banned members from today (don't worry; I'm not invading anyone's privacy--those are all bots):



The good news is that Ning is putting in place measures to stop this. Every time we ban a member for spam, that information is propagated throughout the Ning system (they have more than a million network like DIY Drones) and if an account is banned on one network, it will be banned on all of them. But we're up against a botnet of millions of zombie PCs, so sometimes the bad guys get ahead.

Ning just posted the new tactics it will be putting in place to turn the tide: "We have the initial captcha for first time posters now and will be adding a temporary suspension too." Hopefully, this will start to take effect soon and our moderators can take a break. Until then, a huge thanks!
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T3

Testing 'ArduIMU V2 Test' viewer by HappyKillmore with FLEXIPILOT Single Gyro

Posted by Krzysztof Bosak on March 9, 2010 at 5:06pm

Testing FLEXIPILOT single gyro and ArduIMU V2 viewer from Krzysztof Bosak on Vimeo.


The biggest problem: yaw angle is displayed incorrectly:
either emitting 0...360 deg or -180...180 deg got strange jump.

Accel Yaw: there could be only AccelZ,

calculating any kind of yaw

with accelerometers makes no sense.
may I suggest also renaming AccelPitch to AccelY
and AccelRoll to AccelX.

The units of Acceleration display are strange,
normally the Gs are +/-10 max.

10 points for very high update rate :-)


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Podcast Episode 19 - Nathan Seidle, CEO of Sparkfun

Posted by Tim Trueman on March 8, 2010 at 11:00pm


iTunes links
AAC: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330632997
MP3: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330633212

RSS feed
AAC: http://feeds.feedburner.com/diydrones
MP3: http://feeds.feedburner.com/diydronesmp3

Nathan's addiction to microcontrollers brings peace and joy to thousands of people with the products, classes and tutorials in the seven years since he started SparkFun Electronics.


CNN Money piece on Nathan: http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/smallbusiness/0902/gallery.make_believers.smb/6.html

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Developer

No Baro altitude filter for ArduPilot

Posted by Ryan Beall on March 8, 2010 at 7:18pm

I wrote down a napkin sketch of an altitude filter a while back and finally got around to testing it in the simulator. I designed it to improve the sensed altitude of the ardupilot. It is based on a fixed gain observer model and shows very promising results. The idea is to use the "lagless" airspeed sensor to give you a less noisy lagless altitude estimate. Enjoy!

K_alt = -0.01;
avg_aoa = 0.52*(pi/180); //alpha = 0.52 deg on the average
gamma = theta - avg_aoa;

alt_est = alt_est + Vair*sin(gamma)*dt;
alt_error = alt_est - GPS_alt;

alt_est += K_alt*alt_error;

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Project Andromeda Ground Station

Posted by Nima K on March 8, 2010 at 2:16pm


The above picture shows the Project Andromeda ground station circuitry. You can also see the DNT900 from RFM. I believe there has been some interest on this radio in the DIY Drones community and once I finish the construction of the autopilot I will be able to give a recount of my experiences with it. So far, however the radio seems to be extremely capable (especially compared to the Aerocomm AC4790 radios that we previously used).


You can find more information related to the ground station and the DNT900 in the full article available at: http://www.projectandromeda.com.au/blog.

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Coyote - small UAV from big guys

Posted by automatik on March 8, 2010 at 9:39am


ViewMedia?mgid=211844&vid=5&download=1



Found this interesting - small UAV from BAE Systems

"The Coyote is a small, electric-powered unmanned aircraft system. Initially designed with funding from the U.S. Navy, it weighs only 13
pounds and has a 58-inch wingspan. Once deployed, it can cruise faster
than 60 knots for more than an hour, conducting research or performing
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions."
Source: EON

Also here is a video of proposed deployment:



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3D Robotics

Another flight test of new ArduPilot 2.5 code

Posted by Chris Anderson on March 7, 2010 at 7:30pm

Here's a quick report on today's test flight of the latest ArduPilot 2.5 code, including a failed T3 contest run:

(I was using an EasyStar with XY & Z sensors)

The Good

--This version does away with the bind plug process for people who are using ArduPilot to control the throttle (which I am). Worked fine!

--Stabilization gains are dialed in fine. Earlier problems with people using the Z sensor are gone.

--Funky motor pulsing issues at startup and problems with ESC arming are gone.

--New GPS parser for uBlox works fine.

The Bad

--Altitude hold doesn't seem to be working in AUTO mode (although it does seem to work in RTL mode). The plane is supposed to stay at 50m, as you can see in the mission file above, but just seemed to go higher and higher. I had to bring it back manually from about 200m. We've had this problem before, and I think it has to do with the uBlox GPS parser. If it thinks the GPS is reporting that the plane is at an altitude of 0, it will just keep trying to fly higher. We'll need to fly with someone watching the telemetry to figure out what's going on.

--I accidentally set my waypoint radius limit too high (59m) so the plane was just approximately following the course. That should have been closer to 10m.

--The RTL loiter circles were more like figure eights. I think the loiter radius (45m) is too tight, and should be closer to 100m:
//4-7
#define LOITER_RADIUS 45 // radius in meters of a Loiter

The Stupid

Somehow I was under the impression that I could adjust the throttle while the plane was in AUTO mode (you can nudge the aileron/rudder and elevator in that mode). That doesn't appear to be the case. The reason this matters is that if you're trying to set a good time on a T3 run, you don't want the plane to leisurely go around at half throttle!

In the meantime, I need to change something in the settings below. I'm thinking I should crank the Absolute figure up, but how high? (Is it 0-10?). Jason, do you have some advice? Any chance we can allow the user to nudge the throttle when it's in AUTO mode?

//ATTITUDE: THROTTLE OUTPUT GAINS
//9-1
#define THROTTLE_ABSOLUTE 3 //Absolute
//9-2
#define THROTTLE_P .32 //Proportional
//9-3
#define THROTTLE_I .04 //Integrator
//9-4
#define THROTTLE_I_MAX 50 // (0-125) 50 = 40% Integrator limit.
//9-5
#define THROTTLE_CRUISE 30 // (0-125) 30 = 24% throttle, or (int)target airspeed for cruising
//9-6
#define THROTTLE_MAX 60 // (0-125) 60 = 48% maximum throttle
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Hand made GPS receiver.

Posted by Ho-Chung Chang on March 7, 2010 at 3:05am
I had bought MStar GPS module for UAV Board. But the datasheet is not very clear for this one. So I have made a test board for test it.


It is fast to get location when power on.(32 sec), but I confused the date of GPS is wrong. Although I just want the location, altitude, direction and speed information. XD






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