I hope we can all contribute to the Anti-Terror war, by building UAVs, sending them into the DOD and having them take consumer research and make it into something that will protect us in return forn our troubles...
I certainly will donate some of my butterflies...
Hi everyone, I am running a student satellite project in Pakistan. http://www.informationvision.net . Now I want to start a student UAV project. My aim is to develop an agriculture UAV which can monitor SALIN water in Rahim Yar Khan which is major issue for the farmers in the region. Can anyone help me with documentation for the projeect.
I was reminded by the Pict'Earth guys last weekend that one of the best all-purpose planes for carrying cameras, GPS recorders and any other sort of equipment you want to test is the Multiplex EasyStar, a virtually unbreakable powered glider. Because it's made of elastopore foam you can carve out the equipment compartment to carry pretty much anything you want, and the same foam protects everything in case of a "hard landing".
EasyStars are available for $54 without the radio equipment. This post is just a quickie to show you what else you'll need top make them good UAV platforms.
Although the kit comes with a brushed motor, I suggest you upgrade to a brushless so you can carry heavier loads with ease. This motor is a perfect fit and has power to spare. I matched it with this ESC. As always, you'll want Li-Ion batteries if you can afford them. An 11.1v, 2200 mAh pack will allow you to fly for more than half an hour under power. A 6x4 prop fits perfectly
For a radio, almost anything with six channels or more will do. The EasyStar has compartments pre-cut for servos; the HITec HS81s fit them best.
Finally, here's an important point. With the more powerful brushless motor, you'll find that rudder is really too small to be effective. You need to make it bigger to increase its "authority", which both helps in more extreme moves and at slow speed. The easiest way is to glue or double-sided-tape two business cards to the rudder. Here's a picture of one such mod (I didn't bother to trim mine as neatly as this guy did): Once you've done all that you can shove all manners of cameras and such in the equipment area. If you don't want to carve holes in the bottom, you can always just bolt a camera to a bit of wood and strap it to the top, like this.
me and my college friends built small Glider UAV with real time video camera transmission. but my remote control works only visual range. We intend to extend the uav range to 5 miles with the help of Autopilat and ground control software. can anyone help me to chose the extended range remote control. (what model RC and where can i buy this things by online or anywhere in europe.)
SOOn i will post my entire UAV project in website.
I'm posting this because I feel honestly conflicted about something that's come up. As readers of this blog know, one of my side projects
is making Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ("drones") and the technology that
goes into them. Everything I do is open source, and I share much of it here. There are also loads of other open source UAV projects, led by amateurs from Germany to Australia.
People often think of UAVs as military tools, whether as spy planes or Hellfire-launching robot weapons. We're hoping to change that perception by showing how useful UAVs can be for everything from commercial geomapping to scientific sensing. But the UAV-as-weapon concern is persistent, and many people have asked whether we, by making the technology available and easy to use, might be inadvertently be helping our enemies.
My usual response is that the technology is out there anyway, and by doing things in public we're just making it easier for authorities to know what's possible and who's working on it. Hezbollah already has UAVs, after all, and the technologies we use (which range from cellphones to Lego) are hardly export-controlled.
But all that came to a head today when I read the main UAV newsgroup, and saw that Amir Aalipour, an Iranian in Tehran, had posted some pictures of his swing-wing UAV (shown), proudly bedecked with the colors of the Iranian flag. He's been following the discussion in these forums for some time and now wanted to come forward with his own impressive work.
Part of me says "Bravo Amir! Excellent work on the airframe, and thanks for posting." And part of me says "Yikes. We're helping Iranians make UAVs draped in nationalistic colors. This isn't going to help us in our efforts to destigmitize drones."
Obviously Iranian != terrorist/bad guy/anti-Israeli zealot. And needless to say, most of the terrorist/bad guy/anti-Israeli zealots out there who are building UAVs aren't posting on RC Groups. But what should I do if Amir or someone like him from a country associated with Bad Stuff posts on our own forums looking for technical advice? My instinct is to treat everyone alike and help anybody who asks, regardless of where they're from (odds are Amir is just a geek like the rest of us, no matter where he lives). But how does this look to someone in Washington? We're just a pen stroke away from being regulated out of existence, and in this climate it's politically unwise to discount the Homeland Security card (my own feelings about that notwithstanding).
I know, that's an ignorant, xenophobic and paranoid reaction. And my first instinct is to pay nationality no mind. But as I say, I'm conflicted on this. What would you do?
[UPDATE: Amir himself responds in the comments of my other blog. He's 17 years old. Which makes what he's done all the more impressive.]
Hi every one i am a newby in this site. can anyone suggest me to make UAV for the RC and video transmission range of 10 miles. And good quality video camere with maximum zooming facility.
[UPDATE: I've found an even better way that costs $25, is simpler and works perfectly. It's here]
Once again I started a weekend with a crazy idea and once again I had it working by Sunday evening. (Needless to say I'm not going to win any parenting award until this particular obsession runs its course). This time it was trying to resolve a problem that cropped up in our Googleplex UAV mission. Many of the photos from that series are from angles, rather than straight down as you'd want for Google Maps imagery, because the airplane was banking quite a lot to keep within the boundaries of the Google campus.
The aerial photography pros solve this problem with expensive gyro-stabilized camera platforms. But to keep to our credo of making UAVs as cheap and easy as possible, I used stuff lying around the house to make a totally functional gyro-stabilized camera mount for less than $100.
The secret ingredient is an off-the-shelf "heading hold" gyro made for a R/C helicopter. These can be found for as little as $40, but after some experimentation I found that you need one that has special circuitry to resist gyro drift (there are several of them here, ranging from $74 to $199. I'm going to test several of them to find the cheapest one that works; right now I'm using one I had that doesn't have drift cancellation and it won't work for anything but benchtop tests).
UPDATE: the test is here.
For the tilting camera mount and base, you'll need a sheet of relatively thin aluminum. I used a .032 X 6 X 12 sheet. Anything thicker won't bend properly. I cut out several prototypes from cardboard before committing to metal (and still had to do the metal twice, when the first sheet proved to be too thick). I've made a pdf that you can print out and use as a template (when printing, set "page scaling" to "none" so it prints full-size). This one was designed for a Canon Digital Elph camera (all the recent vintages, from the 500 to 900 series, are about the same size); if you're using a different camera you may need to modify some dimensions slightly to fit. More pictures to help you with bending are here.
One of the other problems that cropped up on the Googleplex mission was that we needed to take pictures much faster--at least twice a second. That means putting the camera in "continuous shooting" mode, which unfortunately can't be triggered with the computer-controlled IR trigger we used on the Pentax. So I also included a mechanical shutter switch, which is the blue servo in the top picture. It just holds the shutter down when activated, either by the on-board computer or manually with a switch on the R/C transmitter.
Here's a video of the whole thing at work, strapped to the bottom of our Predator UAV:
Photo of the real thing:
This weekend I was at the Google campus in Mountain View for the SciFoo scientific conference. My session was on using micro UAVs for mapping and scientific sensing, and I thought it would be fun to give a little demonstration. What better than a UAV mission over the Googleplex?
This was cool for a number of reasons. First, you may have noticed that the Google campus "satellite" view is much higher resolution than almost any other imagery on Google maps. (The way you can tell is to switch to satellite view, click on the "Link to this page" button, and then edit the URL so that "z=19" becomes "z=22", which is the maximum resolution available. Like this.)
Suffice to say, that imagery didn't come from a satellite. Instead I happen to know it was taken by a small aircraft with 5 megapixel cameras at 600 ft.
I wanted to do better. So at the crack of dawn on Sat morn, I was on a nearby field planning my mission.
Because I didn't have a runway to take off from, I used GeoCrawler 3, which can be hand launched. I wanted better imagery than the cellphone camera could provide, so I put the cellphone inside the fuselage (it would still do the GPS navigation) and strapped a digital camera to the bottom of the plane instead. I put in a few GPS lat-longs taken from Google Maps and off we flew.
It was a perfect day for flying, with virtually no wind and nobody around. I took off manually, steered the plane to north end of the campus at about 200 ft, and turned it over to the autopilot. Because I was so close I could see the plane the whole time, and truth be told I mostly did manual turning at the end of each run because we were in a built-up area and I didn't want to take the risk of missing a waypoint and losing sight of the plane, even for a few seconds. So to be accurate this wasn't a fully autonomous UAV mission, although the plane was capable of that.
The first pass was with a Pentax Optio A30, which is a small 10 megapixel digicam that supports an IR remote. I'd stuck an IR trigger board over the IR window on the front of the camera, connected that to my serial-to-servo board, and had the cellphone autopilot send a trigger signal to the board every two seconds (which is the fastest the camera will take pictures in remote mode). This worked great except for two things:
So it was back to the launching point for a quick change to another camera. I swapped in the Pentax W30, which has a built-in time-lapse mode and doesn't need to be IR-triggered. I knew that the camera's minimum delay interval between time-lapse shots was an interminable ten seconds, which would make mosaicing the pictures impossible, but I hoped I'd at least get a few sample shots to demonstrate the high-resolution possible from these planes.
I'd previously tested the W30 from the air and found that it didn't have the same motion blur problem, for reasons that I don't quite understand (it's only a 7 megapixel, so perhaps its CCD processes the imagery faster).
Another launch, with the same starting points and path, and a quick return to check the imagery. This looked much better, so I took it up for one final series of passes. By 7:30 am we were done, and it was time to head into breakfast at the conference and admire the shots on a laptop. Here are some samples of what we got, with the same locations at the highest resolution on Google Maps as a comparison, and my with my imagery at about the same scale.
The advantages of the low-altitude UAV imagery go beyond the higher resolution. It's more recent, so, for example, you can see that since the imagery in Google Maps was taken, Google has put solar cells on every roof in the complex. That's great, and they deserve more credit for this. Updating their imagery to show the extent of it (see example below) would help.
You can also fact-check existing imagery. On Google maps, one of the campus's cool infinity pools has the company's logo at the bottom. In reality, it doesn't--the logo was photoshopped on:
(Real Googler's will spot the flaw in my data. What you're actually seeing in my images are the blue pool covers, not the water itself. But I walked over and lifted them up to confirm that the logo isn't there. Ground truth!)
All pretty cool. But before you get too impressed, remember that I can't tile these shots into a proper map because I don't have enough imagery. I just have loads of random shots of the campus from the air, which isn't really very useful. Next time I'm going to attempt to solve this with a Canon Digital Elph camera shooting in rapid-sequence mode, which is less than a second between shots. Canon's got some of the fastest CCD sensors and image processing chips around, so I'm optimistic that this will give me enough imagery for the photo-stitching software to take over and make a proper map. That, however, will require making a custom camera mount with a servo that can physically push the camera shutter button, because the Canons don't have IR remotes or anything else I can electronically trigger. This isn't too hard, but may take me a week or two. Stay tuned...
Finally, a note for anybody thinking of doing the same thing--don't. I checked this with the right people at Google, and they unofficially agreed to look the other way because I was flying a small (under 3 lbs) electric plane that couldn't hurt either buildings or people, and was doing the demonstration as part of scientific conference on campus. Google has lots of 24/7 security on electric vehicles, and you really don't want them coming after you. Plus there's those rooftop laser cannons ;-)
The chairman of the aviation committee for the International Association of Chiefs of Police... Donald Shinnamon... charges that the FAA is applying its rules inconsistently and defying federal laws about government-operated aircraft.
"There is an immediate need by state and local public safety personnel for unmanned aerial systems," he said at an unmanned systems confab here this week. But by his interpretation, the FAA's rules mean "it's OK to fly a model aircraft but not OK to fly an aircraft in search of a murder suspect" without its permission...
Local officials aren't necessarily looking for unfettered UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle]-driving rights, Shinnamon said. Ideally, the FAA will be able to work with state and local government officials to come up with UAV-specific regulations, which address things like how high the drones can fly, how far they can travel from their operator, and whether they need to be in the driver's line of sight.
"Once we overcome this regulatory issue, I honestly think the use of this technology will explode at the local government level because it offers just so many benefits to us and the ability to serve our citizens," Shinnamon said.
[L.A. Sherrif's Department Sid] Heal, whose office tested a drone last year but has not yet secured formal permission to use it, said he doesn't "detect any sense of urgency" on the FAA's part to make its regulations simpler for local officials to follow.
"We're going to do this; this is coming," he said. "And (the FAA) can jump on this train or they can run along behind it, but it is going to leave without them."
