uav update

Greg, correct me if I've missed anything here, but here is a quick 
summary of our flights this morning.

Equipment squawks:

1. Video camera was not working, no video.
2. Engine mounts are starting to vibrate loose.  We need to pop off the 
cowl and tighten up everything.

Results:

1. We successfully flew out of Jensen field, and started to get the feel 
for how things are laid out down there.

2. We had some success with the synthetic display.  The big issue is 
that we appear to not be getting 50hz attitude updates ... closer to 
5hz.  We need to figure out if this is due to midg configuration, 
aerocom issues, or Curt's serial port interfacing code.  The data rate 
was too slow for successful "under the hood" flying.  But there is 
enough data there for nice replays in FlightGear.

3. Ted's photoreal model of Jensen worked out really well.  It looked 
nice and we had it placed pretty close to right on (probably within the 
limits of gps accuracy.)

Wants:  Here are some things that Greg and I discussed that will need to 
be considered sooner or later.

1. Transportation in our small vehicles is doable, but not ideal.  As we 
accumulate equipment, this will become more and more of an issue.

2. Setting up a ground station outside with laptops is problematic.  The 
amount of light makes it difficult to read the displays.  This is 
probably a much more critical issue than transportation space.  Today we 
setup on a picnic table in the shade of one of the hangers, but after 
late morning, there is no longer shade in that area.

3. A medium size trailer configured for part storage/transportation and 
part mobile ground station might be able to address issue 1. and 2.  I 
have a trailer hitch on my Jetta, but the Jetta is a small car and thus 
I am limited to pulling only small trailers.

4. Autopilot/stability augmentation.  For remote piloting with suspect 
data rates, it would be very beneficial to have some sort of stability 
augmentation system or autopilot.  For instance, a system that could 
hold altitude, heading, and speed until I command something different 
would greatly reduce pilot load and allow me to make better use of the 
avaible displays and information coming to the ground.

The gusty winds today didn't help our cause, that combined with low data 
rates made it pretty impossible to track what the plane was doing and 
keep it in the area.

It would also be nice to have a smart fail safe so the airplane could 
turn and head home in the event of a transmitter signal loss from the 
ground (i.e. we start to fly out of range of our R/C transmitter.)

Maybe the xbow system will take care of this?  The FMA direct co-pilot 
could help?  We could build our own controller based on MIDG data?  Gumstix?

So those are some things to think about anyway.

Regards,

Curt.

-- 
Curtis Olson        http://www.flightgear.org/~curt
HumanFIRST Program  http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
FlightGear Project  http://www.flightgear.org
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