autopilot: Do it yourself UAV (original) (raw)

Latest news:

• Drupal Broke, so we've moved back to the "old" website for now. (20 Dec 2005)
• Successful navigation tests: When the autopilot was engaged, the cyclic stick became an absolute north/south position with 10 meters of authority in each direction.Test 1,test 2andinterpretation of the data.
• IT WORKS! The system hovered Dennis' Nova for several tanks of fuel, holding a position with full authority on the cyclic and tail rotor. You can see iton the benchandin hands-off flight. There is also ashort Quicktime movie of it (4.9 MB). There aremore details in this posting, and more movies to come. (16 June 2003)
• Release 2.5 is out. This code has many updates, including a new network layer, rev2.4 hardware support, diagnostic utilities, and more. (March 26, 2003)
• Rev 2.4 hardware is now available. Updates include high-speed tail servo support, ground plane for reduced noise, seperate xy and z sensor boards, tachometer support, and more. (March 20, 2003)
• PCM decodingis progressing. I've done some work to analyze a few frames and have producedan image of the PCM data from my Futaba 8U (28 January 2003)
• Release 2.4is out. This has the code that actually flew the helicopter a few weeks ago. (20 October 2002)
• ahrs.cthat runs on the Mega163 at 25 Hz. Six state Kalman filter produces an attitude estimate from the accelerometer and gyro readings. (19 October 2002)
• Recommended readings from Aaron Kahn (15 October 2002)
• Flights with the seven state filter and compass.Images and details(14 October 2002)
• Ground stationwritten infltk(10 October 2002)
• 16 bit -> 8 bit SPI bridge works (27 September 2002)
• Successful autonomous flights! (22 September 2002)
• 2.2 board flown under manual control (18 August 2002)
• 25 Rev 2.2 kits shipped, 10 assembled so far (1 August 2002)
• Group order for 2.2 boards (July 2002)
• Rev 2.1 board demonstrates inertial sensors (July 2002

What's going on here?

We're building a system for autonomous aerial vehicles for the hobbiest. The entire design and all software is available as Free Software, licensed under the GPL. The goal is to produce a do-it-yourself autopilot kit that anyone can build and fly.

Our initial target is 60 sized model helicopters and less than $500 in parts. So far we've been very successful -- one of our 2.2 boards has hovered a Concept 60 for several minutes at a time under attitude command from the safety pilot. It isn't totally autonomous yet, but the demonstration has proven that the inertial measurement unit (IMU) and Kalman filter approach work well.

How do I get involved?

If you're interested in helping out, please sign up for the one of themailing lists. You may also want to view theFrequently Asked Questions. There is alsosource code to download and hardware to run it on. Project details are available on oursourceforge project page.