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3D Robotics

Update on ArduPilot Pro

Posted by Chris Anderson on October 5, 2008 at 3:49pm

While we debug some production glitches in ArduPilot, work on ArduPilot Pro (the dual-core board with built-in stabilization) is moving ahead. Jordi's working on the first production candidate, which is shown above with the FMA thermopile sensor head, which we're using for testing. Click on the picture for a bigger version.
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3D Robotics

Air Force's New 'Killer Zombie' Drone

Posted by Chris Anderson on October 4, 2008 at 10:09am
Armed Predator and Reaper drones have become the primary weapons in the fight against Pakistani militants. But they can be pricey; the Reapers come in at around a hundred million dollars each. Which is why the Air Force is working on a cheaper option: killer zombies. Visit Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, and you'll see rows upon of obsolete F-4 Phantom II aircraft – or at least their gutted carcasses. This is the Aerospace Maintenance And Regeneration Center or AMARC -- whatever you do, don't call it the Boneyard. For many years, it has been common practice to resurrect these deceased planes as QF-4 unmanned drones, so that they can have a brief and undignified existence as "full-scale aerial targets." Everything in the inventory -- from Sidewinder missiles to Patriots -- have been tested on one at some point, even though some find it "kind of hard to shoot at such a magnificent aircraft." Some 230 Phantoms have been through this resurrection process since 1995. It costs about $800,000 U.S. per aircraft. The tail and wingtips are painted orange to they can be easily distinguished from manned aircraft. Typically they are flown several times. Not all tests need to end in the plane being shot down, and there is an onboard scoring system to determine how close a warhead came. Up to six QF-4s can be flow together remotely by computer, maintaining tight formation using GPS. (Hey, how about a robotic version of the Blue Angels?) But earlier this year, the zombie fleet got a new twist (see photo): one of them fired a modified High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile. "This is the first air-to-ground missile fired off an unmanned full-scale aerial target," said Major Markle. "This test is an important part of the Det. 1 mission because it increases survivability of our Airmen going against (surface-to-air missile) threats. Furthermore, it's the first time the drone has been able to shoot back. … "With this successful test, we have pioneered a new venue to test forward-firing ordnance without risk to valuable air assets or crew members," said Lt. Col. Joel Rush, Det. 1's commander. The High Speed Anti-radiation Missile, or HARM, locks on to the radar guidance of surface-to-air missiles. The QF-4 mission was simply to test the missile. When you're working with a new experimental high-powered rocket motor, it makes sense to keep humans as far away as possible. (Aircraft missile testing is a hazardous business – some may be familiar with Pete Purvis' account of shooting himself down with a Sparrow missile.) Could this become more than a mere experiment. Well, the idea of attacking enemy air defenses with a drone seems like a life-saver. Doing it with a QF-4 drone sounds like a money-saver, too. Those HARM missiles cost over $300,000 each. If you have four of them on a QF-4, the whole package comes out to $2 million or so. That's a small fraction of a Reaper's price tag. So maybe the undead QF-4 should get its revenge on the living and get to fire some missiles itself for a change. Let's hear it for the new Phantom Menace… [Republished from our Danger Room blog]
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YARB flies again - now with 3D stereo vision

Posted by Howard Gordon on October 2, 2008 at 10:52pm

YARB (yet another robotic blimp) is back in business, now carrying a new Surveyor SVS (stereo vision system) controller with a pair of Blackfin cameras. The new rig weighs about the same as the previous single-camera setup with added sensors. It is actually a bit too light, so ballast has been added using washers held in place on the Wifi antenna.

There is a new simplified console that steers via 4 arrow keys for direction (up, down, left, right), the return key for reverse, and the spacebar to stop motors. Control via keyboard seems more direct than using mouse clicks, though the console will be able to steer via mouse clicks directly on the display window - this would work nicely with portable phones (iPhone, Android, etc).
Viewing of the live or archived video requires anaglyph (red/cyan) 3D glasses 3D_glasses_red_cyan75.gif. Here is a short 3d stereo video clip captured from the blimp ...

yarbsvs1.avi (5.2MB)3D_glasses_red_cyan75.gif
It is fun to fly YARB around using stereo vision, but the real point of this exercise is to develop the functions that compute disparity between views of the two cameras in order to create a depth map. Similar to human depth perception, this enables the robot to measure distances to objects and obstacles without any additional ranging sensors (e.g. sonar, IR, laser). Work has already started to develop this capability in the Blackfin firmware.
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3D Robotics

Fossett wreck location?

Posted by Chris Anderson on October 2, 2008 at 10:30am
The FAA has declared a no-fly zone over the location where the Fossett wreck was found. The Google Earth blog has mapped that into a KML file, so you can explore the location from satellite imagery in Google Earth (no guarantee that the imagery is recent enough to show the wreck, or high enough resolution). Here are the details. [UPDATE: lots more on this in this Wired Science post.]
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3D Robotics

It's on: Microchip vs. Atmel

Posted by Chris Anderson on October 2, 2008 at 9:30am
Looks like there's a battle brewing in the embedded processor market. Microchip, which makes the PIC processor line that was the main microprocessor of the last generation, has made a bid to buy Atmel, which makes the AVR chip line that is the hot architecture of this generation (it's the family that our Arduino Atmega168 processor is part of). The bid is for $2.3 billion, but Atmel has rejected it and says it's not looking to sell. Is this a defensive move by Microchip, afraid that it will lose the crown to the fast-rising Atmel? The Makezine has more.
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3D Robotics

AttoPilot specs

Posted by Chris Anderson on October 1, 2008 at 6:30pm
Dean has posted a pdf spec sheet for AttoPilot. Here are the basics: Specifications and Features: Small size: 1.0 ounce control unit 1” x 1” x 1.5”, 2.6 ounces total with GPS and all sensors 6 servos and 6 R/C inputs: 4 flight control + 2 auxiliary servos. Elevon and V-tail mixing are easy to setup. 100% compatible with all 1-2ms pulse 5V and 3V logic R/C receivers, and the newer 2.4GHz R/C systems Flight modes (4): • Autonomous – specific coordinate flight plan, or template plan • Autopilot bypass; remote radio control with Elevon or V-tail mixing • Remote radio control with autopilot stabilization assistance for pitch and roll • Remote radio control with autopilot stabilization for pitch and roll plus navigation; fly by wire Stabilization system: 50 Hz attitude control with automatic control gain scheduling based on airspeed. Elevator gain scheduling for optimal altitude control through turns Onboard data logging: 40+ parameters logged as a comma-delimited .txt file to removable micro-SD media Two-way telemetry: Downlink of 3 nmea GPS sentences plus a proprietary $ATTO nmea message for live moving map in 3D plus virtual cockpit, real time flight plan editing, commanded mission abort, and semi-autonomous flight List of sensors: • Pressure (2): Pitot airspeed and Barometric altitude • 3-axis horizon sensing with dynamic bias correction using other sensors as cross reference • 5Hz GPS with added data smoothing via real time least squares fits • Power sensing: 0-53 Volts, 0-92 Amps, 0-4900 Watts. Energy consumption tracked to 210 Amp hours (Ah) • Auxiliary analog input for user defined function (temperature probe, 2nd voltage or current sensor, etc…) GPS: 5Hz update rate, 10 ft CEP (circular error of probability), DGPS (differential GPS) enabled Waypoints: • 100 user defined waypoints: lat, lon, altitude, airspeed, and multiple trigger options • Lat and Lon to 5th decimal degrees (3 ft) and 3 ft for altitude • Return-to-home position: defaults to start location or specify at a remote location • Create waypoint paths graphically with point and click ease on your PC, with or without internet connection • Waypoint file optionally may be marked as a template. AttoPilot remaps a template path to current location upon GPS lock at power up. Useful for photo mapping grid at various flight locations without a laptop PC in the field. A big saving of pre-flight setup time for multiple repeated missions in various locales. Triggers: • RTL (return to launch) based on low pack voltage, mAh consumption, or maximum time allotment • Loiter at waypoints, specify circle radius, altitude, direction, and duration • Auxiliary servo or logic controls at specified waypoints or between waypoints with time or distance intervals • Distance interval triggers are perfect for grid photo mapping Barometric altitude: Estimation to 0.3 ft and real world control to +/- 6 ft. Barometric climb rate estimated to 0.3 ft/s Maximum Limits: • Distance per waypoint leg: unlimited • Flight plan total distance: unlimited • Turn rate: 120 deg/s • Pitch and roll rate: 300 deg/s • Pitch angle: 60 deg • Roll angle: 60 deg • Altitude: 30,000 ft barometric and 60,000 ft GPS • Airspeed: 125 mph via Pitot tube • Speed: Above 125 mph, GPS speed is used
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Developer

Alternative way to control Google Maps with Labview

Posted by Jordi Muñoz on October 1, 2008 at 2:30am
This is a nice example of how to control Google Maps.With this Labview VI you are able to:1-Control the center Point of the Map with the desired coordinates.2-Control the Size, Zoom and the Format of the Map (terrain, hybrid, etc).3- You are able to put multiple balloons, and change color, size,, etc.4-You are able to draw paths between the center point and the balloons.You can attach multiple GPS and display the position of each with a balloon, please modify it to your needs.The bad: Is a little bit slow, depending on your internet connection.Files:Google_maps_by_Jordi.zip
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Next Steps: UAV_Zwo

Posted by HugePanic on September 29, 2008 at 9:30pm
Since UAV_Eins is MIA since a couple of weeks, my projekt slowed down a little bit.I also burned my arduino board, and had to replace it. "5V" really means output, NOT input... ;)The new arduino arrived a couple of days later, together with the em-406a GPS module.. :)The first GPS-code a copied from the arduino HP worked perfektly.I also ordered a arduino prot shield to replace my wire construction for servo connection. now i can just put it on the arduino at once, and everything is connected. Power for the arduino is seperate now direct from the lipo battery. The receiver and servos are powerd by the esc. Only the gps is powerd by the arduino, so i keep the load for the arduino voltage converter low.Then i tried to use my "old" servo controler code with the new board.The funny thing is that the two board (old and new) are NOT compatible!!!!The pulseIn commands reads about 1k more "signal" from the receiver. This also brought some problems with the used integer variables. It took me about 2 evenings of work to figure that out.. :(Current Status is solved! :)Next step is to merge everything together in one big autopilot code.I will copy (and slightly modify) the arduino GPS functions, but write my own navigation code (all to be published).I will post an image of the proto shield when i am done with it, still missing one servo connector for the FMA-CoPilot control....Maybe i can start with the airframe next week! I think this wont take more than 10h of work, so the smalles problem....regardsme
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3D Robotics

Winners of the 2008 Outback Rescue competition

Posted by Chris Anderson on September 29, 2008 at 4:55pm

(above: crashes and near crashes at the competition) From the press reports: TOOWOOMBA man Simeon O'Neill and his best mate used their patched-up 30-year-old model plane to beat teams of university aerospace engineers at the UAV Challenge in Kingaroy. Mr O'Neill and his high school buddy Aaron Donaldson, from Geelong, won the main event, the Search and Rescue open category, taking home $5000. The Unmanned Airborne Vehicles (UAVs) Outback Challenge was held at the Kingaroy Airport and finished yesterday. The pair heard about the competition last year and decided to rebuild Mr Donaldson's dad's 1978 model plane that was gathering dust in the shed. With a budget of about $6000, they were impressed with their winning efforts. "Everyone was aerospace engineers, Simeon and I didn't finish more than a semester of engineering," Mr Donaldson said. "QUT had a budget of about $30,000 and the United States university had a budget of about $25,000. And both university teams crashed their planes." The pair could have won the $50,000 prize. But they failed to complete the challenge after a wiring plug came loose and forced them to land. They will use the prize money to prepare another plane. "We're ready for next year now," Mr O'Neill said. See lots more videos in "related videos" here.
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3D Robotics

Poll: how important is a 5HZ GPS to you?

Posted by Chris Anderson on September 29, 2008 at 8:30am
I mentioned in a previous post that we plan to make ArduPilot compatible with both 1Hz and 5Hz GPS modules. The problem is that the 1Hz EM406 that we're currently using is a 5v device and all the 5Hz devices we're looking at are 3.3v. So to be compatible with both, we'll have to put a power regulator on the board (right now it just uses the RC receiver as its power supply), and that will delay us another month for board fabrication and testing. So my question is: how important is 5Hz to you? Plenty of other autopilots, such as the Picipilot, get along fine with 1Hz, and it seems it really only determines how tight your patterns are. ArduPilot Pro will come with a 5Hz GPS built in, but I'm tempted to leave ArduPilot as it is with the EM406, and keep it true to its basic roots for the first version, at least, for the sake of getting it out there sooner rather than later. What do you think?
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3D Robotics

SpaceX countdown on now!

Posted by Chris Anderson on September 28, 2008 at 1:30pm
This has nothing to do with UAVs, but it's cool all the same. SpaceX, the Elon Musk company that aims to be the first private effort to make it to orbit, is scheduled to launch their fourth attempt this afternoon, sometime after 4:00 PST. All details and live webcast as soon as they start the countdown here. [UPDATE: it's on. Webcast here.] [UPDATE 2: THEY DID IT! Huge congrats to the SpaceX team!]
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3D Robotics

Declocking the new ArduPilot boards

Posted by Chris Anderson on September 28, 2008 at 12:30pm
Nothing every works exactly the way you'd hoped. We're testing the new ArduPilot boards and it's looks like we'll need to tweak a few more things. One stems from our decision to run the CPU at its top speed, 20Mhz. That's the best way to get maximum performance (it gives us 20 MIPS), but it introduces some incompatibility with the standard Arduino bootloader and libraries, which for legacy reasons run at 16Mhz or 8Mhz. The usual solution is to recompile the bootloader for 20Mhz and ship the boards with that already loaded (and tweak the way we use clock-dependent libraries), but because this is an open source project that we expect people to modify, this would force DIYers to jump through some pretty gnarly hoops if they want to use libraries affected by clock speed. We could do it anyway and just advise people on what to watch out for, but I worry that it's not user friendly enough (to say nothing of the support and documentation nightmare). So we're thinking about switching the resonator on the board to 16Mhz to make it 100% Arduino compatible. That's a 20% decrease in computational power, but our code is pretty efficient and will still run fine. Still, it's slightly painful to declock your board, and I suspect that we'll be switching back to 20Mhz as soon as Arduino supports that natively. (Needless to say, we'll continue to advance ArduPilot at the pace of Arduino overall, which means switching to a 32-bit processor as soon as that''s supported. Arduino is very much designed to evolve with computer technology, so by hooking our wagon to that horse, we're hoping to future-proof ArduPilot.)
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3D Robotics

Final production ArduPilot boards are in

Posted by Chris Anderson on September 27, 2008 at 12:00am

So cool: the final production ArduPilot boards are in--they're really tiny! We just have to burn the bootloader and upload the ArduPilot code to check all the components. Assuming everything works, we'll just give our production partner the green light and three weeks later I can send you to the page with the "buy now" button! Here's what it looks like with GPS module and pigtails to the RC receiver. (We'll be offering a choice of 1HZ or 5HZ GPS modules.)

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Developer

Totally new antifail system code (uses interrupts and timers, OMG! )

Posted by Jordi Muñoz on September 26, 2008 at 12:30pm
Well better read the source code and enjoy, please try to customize the code to your own system.You need an attiny85 and is programmed with AVR studio (don't forget to desactivate the CLOCK DIVIDED BY 8) it uses the internal crystal, you need also a mux like 74ls157, or either you can use the output pin to read it with you microcontroller in case you are decoding and pulsing the servo with the same system..News: i have internet at home again. (living in the mean time in Swiss).New record: this is the first program i made that runs at the first time i compile it. =)Note: This code will be used in the ardupilot PRO and the arduMUX v2, and maybe the arducopter v2 (coming soon).This code is very well tested... BUT NO WARRANTY'S..CODE Click over there:antifail_antiny.c
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UK FPV Legality

Posted by simonl on September 24, 2008 at 7:59am
Just been reading the latest BMFA News (British Model Flying Association); they've got a small article about European UAS Seminar 2008 they presented at - essentially they're saying that the UAS guys needs to get their act together! Apparently they're unhappy that the UAS community don't have an umberella organisations, and don't appear to be taking safety seriously...The other article that caught my eye was entitled "First Person R/C". It summarises their safety concerns, and lists the following requirements if an FPV flight is to be legal and insurable under BMFA insurance:1. The activity is solely for "sport and recreation" purposes;2. Two pilots must take part;3. A buddy box system must be employed;4. The pilot in charge must operate the master transmitter;5. The pilot in charge must not wear the headset or view the screen;6. The aircraft remains within the natural unaided visual range of the pilot in charge;7. Reliable operation of the buddy box is established;8. A clear handover protocol is established;9. The pilot in charge is solely responsible for the safety of the flight (i.e. they take the legal responsibility.).Seems mostly reasonable to me, but requirement 6 appears to prejudice those wearing spectacles! I'm assuming that's not what is intended, but it's a clause that an insurance company might decide to use to squirm out of their responsibilities in the event of a hefty claim...How do these rules compare with those for other countries?
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