rhklenke
Posts: 2342
Joined: 6/3/2002
From: Richmond, VA, USA
Status: offline
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Well, lets see. We started about 5 years ago doing some electronics design work for a researcher at NASA Langley. We built a board that fit into a PC-104 stack that could generate PWM signals for up to 32 servos to control a "morphing wing" areodynamic test vehicle. The researcher we were doing this for suggested that my students get involved in the AUVSI Student UAV Competition (http://uav.navair.navy.mil/seafarers/default.htm) - I'm a faculty member in computer engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA.
We went to the competition for the first time in 2003. The competition allows the use of commercial autopilots (most teams use Micropilot units which Micropilot will actually donate to the univeristy team), but since we're computer engineers, I decided to have the students build their own autopilot - this also counts as their senior project in computer engineering. We used the modified prop-driven Mig "target drones" (FQM-117B for those who are familiar with them) you see in one of the pictures as our aircraft. Our first autopilot was based on the FMA Copilot unit and a single-board computer with a GPS unit that steared it around. It was kind of a "bang-bang" state-based algorithm that made the plane fly around looking like it had an old escapement radio system in it, but it worked! It had a cheap 2.4 GHz video camera on-board to see the targets. That year, we competed against 7 other teams using commercial autopilots and we won.
The following two years we improved the system. We went to a Linux-based single board computer with programmable hardware, went to full PID-based control algorithms, and a completely functional ground station with video and picture analysis capabilities written in C#. At the 2005 competition, the Admiral who gave the key-note speach at the awards ceremony said "the right vehicle for this competition is a helicopter" so we started moving in that direction. It took two years for us to perfect the helicopter system, but we used it in the 2007 competition. Its a MAH Fury Ion with 16 Amp hours of battery on-board, 810mm blades, and a pan/tilt video system with high res. pictures. All up weight is around 20 lbs. The flight control system is all our own, with the exception of the IMU. We use the MIDG II by Microbotics, as, in our experience, it is much more accurate and tolerant of vibration and manuvering than any other IMU we've tested - and its TINY.
At the 2007 competition, we were the only group using |
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New Forum - 
RE: New Forum - 
Here's some stuff I worked on, a while back... 
