Autonomous Plane Flying Across The USA

June 17, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

sky

Somewhere between San Diego and South Carolina is an unmanned aerial vehicle attempting to make the first autonomous flight across the United States. The plane is electric and requires a landing and battery swap every hour or so, however the MyGeekShow guys are so far the only non-military entity to attempt such an ambitious flight.

The plane making the multiple flights is a Raptor 140 capable of cruising at 75 kph for about an hour before requiring a battery swap. Ground control is an RV, loaded up with LCDs and radios; as long as the RV is within a kilometer or so of the plane, the guys should be able to have a constant telemetry link.

Already the guys at MyGeekShow have pulled off a 52 km autonomous flight, following their flying wing in a car. Even though a hard landing required swapping out the carbon fiber spar for an aluminum one, the plane making the truly cross-country flight is still in good condition, ready to land on a South Carolina beach within a week.

You can follow the trip on the MyGeekShow Twitter. The guys are pulling off an incredible amount of updates and even a few live streams from the mobile command station.

UPDATE: It crashed. Tip stalls aren’t your friend, and undercambered wings exist. Good try, though.

The Autopilot Shield For The Raspberry Pi

June 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 29 Comments

Navio

In the world of drones, quadcopters, and unmanned aerial vehicles, the community has pretty much settled on AVR microcontrollers for the low end, and ARM for the high performance boards. If the FAA doesn’t screw things up, there will soon be another market that requires even more computational power, and Navio, the autopilot shield for the Pi, is just the thing for it.

Where high end multicopter and autopilot boards like the OpenPilot Revolution use ARM micros, there’s a small but demanding segment of the hobby that needs even more processing power. Think of something like the Outback Challenge, where fixed-wing drones search the desert for a lost mannequin autonomously. You’re going to need OpenCV for that, and that means Linux.

Navio is a shield for the Raspberry Pi, complete with a barometric pressure sensor, gyros, accelerometer, and compass, and GPS. It’s designed to run a more real-time version of Linux, and has the ability to do some interesting telemetry configurations – putting a 3G modem on the Navio isn’t much of a problem, and since it’s a Raspi, doing image processing of a downward facing camera is just a matter of writing the code.

The Navio team is currently running an Indiegogo campaign, with the baseline version available for $145. That’s pretty close to the price of the OpenPilot Revolution. There’s also a version upgraded with the U-blox NEO-6T that allows for on-board processing of raw GPS data.

Raspi, GPS, USB hub and battery hooked together

NSA Technology Goes Open Hardware

May 2, 2014 by Will Sweatman 27 Comments

When [Edward Snowden] smeared the internet with classified NSA documents, it brought to light the many spying capabilities our government has at its disposal. One the most interesting of these documents is known as the ANT catalog. This 50 page catalog, now available to the public, reads like a mail order form where agents can simply select the technology they want and order it. One of these technologies is called the Sparrow II, and a group of hackers at Hyperion Bristol has attempted to create their own version.

The Sparrow II is an aerial surveillance platform designed to map and catalog WiFi access points. Think wardriving from a UAV. Now, if you were an NSA agent, you could just order yourself one of these nifty devices from the ANT catalog for a measly 6 grand. However, if you’re like most of us, you can use the guidance from Hyperion Bristol to make your own.

They start off with a Raspi, a run-of-the-mill USB WiFi adapter, a Ublox GY-NEO6MV2 GPS Module, and a 1200 mAh battery to power it all. Be sure to check out the link for full details.

Thanks to [Joe] for the tip!

Using UAVs To Find Mannequins Lost In The Outback

October 7, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

Every other year the Australian Research Center for Aerospace Automation, the government of Queensland, Australia and other government and research institutions hold a contest to develop technology for unmanned aerial vehicles for the wastes of central Australia. Canberra UAV – a group of autonomous drone enthusiasts from the Make, Hack, Void hackerspace – took part in this UAV challenge this year. They ended up with one of the most successful UAVs to every compete, and while they didn’t quite finish the competition they were one of the most successful entries to date.

The goal of the Search and Rescue Outback Challenge is to take off from a landing strip, search for a mannequin named Outback Joe, and deliver 500 ml of life-giving water via air drop. Out of 72 teams entered in to this year’s Outback Challenge, only 6 were allowed to take off – safety restrictions, don’t you know – and all but two hadn’t been destroyed via ‘rapid, unplanned descent’ during qualifications.

UAV Canberra was the only team able to search the entire 5 nautical mile radius search area with their cameras and find Outback Joe. Contest judges gave them permission to drop their payload, but unfortunately the bottle of water was snagged on the engine.

In the many iterations of the Search and Rescue Outback Challenge, UAV Canberra is only the second team to locate a mannequin in the outback, and the first to do it autonomously. A shame, then, that they were unable to claim a victory, but we’ll look forward to their entry in the next Search and Rescue competition.

You can check out a few videos of the Canberra UAV team’s flights after the break.

Continue reading “Using UAVs To Find Mannequins Lost In The Outback” →

Building A Tilt Rotor UAV

October 4, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

We see a lot of quadcopters, and even the occasional octocopter around here. But this build does it with just two propellers. It’s a tiltrotor build which allows the two upward-pointing propellers to tilt forward and backward. The real world equivalent of this UAV design that pops to mind is the V-22 Osprey.

The motors are mounted on a beam running perpendicular to the direction of travel. Each of them is mounted on a bearing which can be rotated by a servo motor. They rotate independently of each other, which allows for yaw. Of course roll is controlled by driving the propellers at different speeds and pitch is adjusted by tilting both mounts at the same time.

[Stephen] mentions that the tiltrotor design has several advantages over its relatives that use more than two props. This design costs less to build, uses less electricity, and makes for an easier autopilot implementation. If you want to see it in the air, don’t miss the clip after the break.

This is just the second tiltrotor build we remember seeing. The other one was a Halloween prop.

Continue reading “Building A Tilt Rotor UAV” →

Laser Power System Keeps UAVs Flying Indefinitely

September 27, 2012 by Mike Szczys 60 Comments

Drone technology is driving the aerospace industry as companies trip over each other trying to develop the next big thing. Here’s a good example of what we’re talking about. Lasers can no be used to keep a UAV in the air indefinitely. The trick is to add an array of photovoltaic cells specifically tuned to an IR laser’s wavelength. A ground system then directs a high-intensity laser beam onto the aircraft’s cell array to transfer energy while in flight.

After the break you can catch a video from a trade show where a Lockheed Martin employee describes the successful testing of such a system. But there’s a lot more information available in the white paper (PDF) which Laser Motive has released. They’re the folks behind the technology who have teamed up with LM to implement the system. The laser unit on the ground can track a UAV visually, but there is also a method of using GPS coordinates to do so in the case of overcast skies.

Continue reading “Laser Power System Keeps UAVs Flying Indefinitely” →

Autonomous Plane? Quadrotor? Both? Meet The ATMOS!

September 4, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 12 Comments

If you’ve been trying to decide between building an autonomous quadcopter or a fixed wing UAV, you may not have to choose anymore. [Team ATMOS] from Tu Delft University in the Netherlands, has developed a UAV that can autonomously transition from quadcopter flight to that of a fixed-wing aircraft. Although the world has seen several successful examples of transitioning-flight or VTOL aircraft, team [ATMOS] claims to have made the first autonomous transition of this type of craft.

This UAV was featured in their school newspaper, which provides a write-up about the work that went into creating this hybrid UAV. When you’re done with that, be sure to check out the two videos after the break. The first shows the [ATMOS] taking off vertically and flying off as a flying-wing fixed aircraft. The second video shows this and other UAVs in the [DARPA] competition that it was designed for. Fast forward to 2:24 to see this aircraft do a fly-by.