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After some months of development this is the first flight of ArduPilot32 platform.

Hardware :

• Ardupilot32 pre alpha hw.
• IMU Oilpan.
• Low Cost (6$) standard PWM ESC.
• PPM_SUM receiver.
• Lipo 2200 3S
• Propeller 10

For this flight I using Arducopter 32 NG firmware. This is my porting of original code to Arm 7 Cortex A3 platform. With this micro will be available more power , more flash and ram resources

This space and performances its very good for improve performance of our Drone. The era of our ARM Drone's Started.

original thread : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/multipilot-20-ap32-building

Regards

Roberto

More from the Berkeley team we wrote about earlier, now with better documentation. From I Heart Robotics: "Patrick Bouffard from the Hybrid Systems Lab at UC Berkeley has done a great job documenting the ROS 3D Contest entry shown below. So it should be easy to reproduce the results if you are lucky enough to have access to a Kinect and an AscTec Pelican quadrotor."

They also note that Ascending Technologies is offering a 15,000 Euro sponsorship for a team doing UAV research. Proposals due by February 13th.

And I can't help but notice that there's a bit of Berkeley robotics cluster forming. Along with all the UC Berkeley research, there's DIY Drones, Berkeley Bionics (exoskeleton makers), 510 Systems (who made Google's robotic streetview cars) and the work at theLawrence Berkeley National Lab.

In this week , I'm working to port APM_ADC , APM_RC , APM_EEPROM , WIRE and other library to Arm Platform .  We' add the support of Radio reciver, gyro and acc sensor that using SPI bus. EEPROM .

We're ready to fly. We need some debug on i2c bus and start to do preflight check.

In the picture you can see my first proto of Quadfox that using Arm Cortex3 Microcontroller instead of AVR 8 bit. So at the end of this week i recived the first Multipilo32 , then I have yet ready a lot of code to test on it.

Regards

Roberto

VS

Dear Friends ,

Today I'm working on IDE for Multipilot 2.0 . I found different kind of approach available For developing application on Arm Cortex A3 microcontroller.

Actually I'm studing this kind of platform :

Xduino , Maple IDE and CooCox IDE.

The first two ide are Clone of official Arduino project . This kind of ide use same Arduino Java ide and add support for gcc arm compiler instead of gcc . Normaly support usb uploading of firmware don' support jtag debugging. The Maple is better of xduino at the moment. The standard arm library is wrapped for using same arduino language sintax. Is not yet fully compatible with original arduino sintax.

The second one instead is a Eclipse ide , that include support for makefile automatic production , gcc compiler , linker, debugger and support Jtag interface for debug and upgrade firmware.

Support a lot of functionality of ARM micro , is available a micro operating systems that support task and preemptive multitasking.

Personally I prefer second kind of approach , more professional approach not for entry level programmer . The first kind of approach is very good for people that normaly use arduino for development of his application .

My idea at the moment is to support all kind of systems .. actualy the second kind of ide don't support the arduino .pde application ,but i think that is possible to develop a wrapper class and a mod for eclipse that support this kind of improvment.

What kind of approach do you prefer ?

http://www.coocox.com/CooCox_CoIDE.htm

http://leaflabs.com/docs/ide.html 

Official Thread : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/what-ide-do-you-prefer-for

Regards

Roberto

Entries for Sparkfun's 2011 Autonomous Vehicle Competition are now open. The event is on April 23rd in Boulder, Colorado at Sparkfun HQ. This is the third year of the AVC. In the first year a DIY Drones team came in first, in the second year we (Doug Weibel!) came in second. Let's not make this an arithmetic pattern!

Here are the new rules for aircraft. Looks like precision landings, low altitude, and autonomous (no hands) take-offs will be winning tactics. Hello, quadcopters!

Air Vehicle Rules:

• Must also go around all four exterior walls of the building.
• The lap time will be calculated from when the Judge says 'Go' to when the plane comes to a halt in the back parking lot. A landing (autonomous or manned) outside the rear parking lot will disqualify the lap time.
• Weather permitting, balloons on long freaking strings will be launched from the four corners of the building. The balloons will serve as guides for the judges/competitors as to the location of the corners/walls of which the non-ground vehicles must circumnavigate.
• Regardless of weather/wind, the vehicles must clear the four exterior walls/corners of the building (not the balloons), verification of clearing the vertical plane will be up to the four line judges.
• Autonomous take off is worth a 10 second reduction from raw time.
• Wheel carriages are allowed for aircraft that don't have their own wheels. Human assisted take-off (throwing a plane) is not considered autonomous.
• Autonomous landing (coming to a halt) within the indicated box is worth a 30 second reduction in time
• Within SFE back lot parking area (not in the box, but must be on our blacktop) gets a 10 second reduction in raw time.
• Time reductions will also be awarded for the three planes that have the lowest peak altitude. To calculate this altitude, SFE will have devices available (likely made up of DEV-09530, SEN-09694 and PRT-00731, came in at 6.71g), weighing no more that 15 grams, to be placed on the UAV by the Judge via double-sided tape on the day of the race. A 60 second reduction goes to the lowest peak, 30 seconds for the second lowest, and 15 seconds for the third lowest. Competitors may also opt not to carry these devices and forego the possibility of a reduced time.

Original Post : Chris A.

Hello everyone,
a year and a half ago came Multipilot 1.0 an inertial platform for applications and semi-professional hobby. After the excellent results obtained from the marketing of these cards, and participation in development projects as open source and Aeroquad Arducopter and 'born www.virtualrobotix.com community.
Today our community is proud to present the evolution of our project: Multipilot 2.0 ST.

Stay tuned :

The characteristics of Multipilot 2.0 are:

• Hardware:
  • ARM7 Cortex-M3 processor STM32F103VET6. 72 Mhz
  • Flash 512 Kbytes RAM 64 Kbytes
  • 16-bit Timer 4
  • SPI 2 (ADC Interface, MicroSD connection)
  • I ² C 2 (First I2C (sensor), Second I2C control until ESC 12)
  • USART 5 (GPS, DEBUG Console, XBee Pro Telemetry)
  • USB 1 (Upload Firmware, Debug Console, Power Board for Debug)
  • CAN 1 (Interconnection with Professional ESC 1 Mbit update rate)
  • 6 PWM Output Bit 16 (ESC / Servo Control)
  • 8 PWM Input 16 Bit (RC Input Channel, accept PPM SUM)
  • 8 Analog Input 12 Bit.
  • Professional 4 layers PCB.
  • DC: DC 30 V (6s Lipo): 5 volts and 3.3 volts
• Sensor Board:
  • Diydrones OilPan . (High quality entry level board)
  • LN Professional Sensor Board: 3 Axis Accelerometer, 3 Axis Gyroscope, 3 Axis Magnetometer , 10 HZ Gps , High Quality Sensor for certify professional application.
• IDE and Development tools:
  • Arduino IDE.
  • Arm GCC Toolchain.
  • Fully compatible with arduino wiring language.
• Firmware:
  • On this platform will be available a lot of RC library developed by Virtualrobotix and Diydrones community.
  • Standard software will be an improved revision of Arducopter , Ardupilot , Multiwii , Aeroquad . The first revision of code will be Arducopter NG .
  • MultiFox Rev 4 special Arm Edition.
• Special Feature :
  • Multipilot 2.0 is fully compatible with ArduPilotMega DiyDrones Board.
  • OEM revision of Multipilot 2.0 available.

Dear Friends,

two years ago i developed a closed source Brushless Controller. It's based on ATmega 8 and support i2c,PWM,Serial Port. The ESC support until 20 Amp and the electronic is present a shunt resistor to evaluate the quantity of energy that the motor need in realtime.

So now I would to port a Arduino bootloader to this board and develop an  opensoure code for it.

But i need help  for this project ... There're some people that would join me in this project ? That's is good choice for Multipilot 2.0 / Ardupilot 32 platform.

Regards

Roberto

http://www.gibonok.altervista.org

is good link   many andress about flight

regards

claudio

The most natural way to interact with a robot is through gestures and voice commands which is the purpose of this hack. Bener Suay is controlling Nao (the incredibly cute) humanoid robot using Kinect. He gives gesture commands and also makes the robot mimic some of his movements. He also says that another purpose of this hack is to make teaching new tasks to robots easier, even for people with no robotics knowledge and the ultimate aim is to make contribution to Learning from Demonstration field.

You can download the source code here https://github.com/wpi-ros-pkg-git/nao_openni

Original pot from : http://kinecthacks.net/controlling-the-humanoid-robot-nao-using-kinect/

It's generally considered a bad idea to pre-announce products, but hey, we're an open source community. It's not pre-announcement--it's transparency!

We're working on about a dozen new products at the DIY Drones factory. Some of them are with partners, so I'm not free to discuss them until the partners give us the green light. But others I can tell you a little bit about now, so you'll have a roadmap to help you make your own technology and deployment plans.

First, one note about backwards compatibility: we're committed to it. This is a fast-moving field, and we're going to release products based on the latest sensors and chips as fast as we can, because this community expects that. Think of autopilots like cellphones: you're probably going to want to upgrade about once a year. But we also work hard to ensure that the hardware you buy today will continue to be supported for at least two years.

Also, new products will be released in beta, as always. Unless you're really keen to help us catch bugs and fix problems, you're not going to want to buy any of these products until they hit the 1.0 software release, which can be as much as six months after hardware release. If all you want is a great-flying UAV, you can't beat the current APM. Most of the following products probably won't hit that level of maturity until late 2011.

Here are some of the highlights:

MultiPilot 2 ST (32-bit ArduPilot!)

This is a 32-bit Cortex M3 (ARM 7) autopilot board (board layout shown above) that's compatible with ArduPilotMega, ArduCopter and the Arduino programming system. Developed by Roberto Navoni of VirtualRobotix and the Foxteam in Italy, working with DIY Drones and the Arduino team, this board uses the APM IMU shield and will run the ArduPilot family of code, just like APM.

You can read more about it here, but the basics are that this board will offer high-end processing power for pro-level autopilot needs in planes, multicopters and helicopters. It can run a Real-Time Operating System and will be ROS-compatible.

Current specs are as follows, although these will be upgraded to the latest chips available at the time of release

• Arm7 Cortex M3 processor STM32F103VET6. 72 Mhz
• Flash 512 Kbytes RAM 64 Kbytes
• 16-bit Timer 4
• SPI 2 (ADC Interface, MicroSD connection)
• I ² C 2 (First I2C (sensor), Second I2C control until ESC 12)
• USART 5 (GPS, DEBUG Console, XBee Pro Telemetry)
• USB 1 (Upload Firmware, Debug Console, Power Board for Debug)
• CAN 1 (Interconnection with Professional ESC 1 Mbit update rate)
• 6 PWM Output Bit 16 (ESC / Servo Control)
• 8 PWM Input 16 Bit (RC Input Channel, accept PPM SUM)
• 8 Analog Input 12 Bit.
• Professional 4 layers PCB.
• DC: DC 30 V (6s Lipo): 5 volts and 3.3 volts

First prototype boards are incoming and you should not expect commercial versions to be available with release code until the second half of the year. Pricing is yet to be determined. Projected Release: Q3

ArduPilotMega 2560

Starting in about two weeks, all APM boards will ship with the Atmega2560 chip, which has twice the memory of the Atmega1280 chip that APM currently uses. There are some other minor changes to the board that have already been released in the 1.4 version that is currently shipping. The current code doesn't need all this memory, so the new boards will operate exactly like the current ones and there is no need to upgrade. But this does give us room for more ambitious enhancement to the code in the future. Projected Release: end Jan

New All-In-One ArduPilot boards

Not everyone wants a flexible development board like APM. Some people want smaller, simpler, cheaper autopilots. That's why we'll be releasing all-in-one versions of APM this year using the new Invensense MPU-6000 6-axis chip (we may be the first autopilot on the market to have them). As promised, we will also update the current APM IMU shield with new sensors when we get them (this is why we made APM modular--so you can upgrade components as technology evolves). Projected Release: Q2

Universal Ground Station

As Jordi hinted in this post, we're developing a universal ground station: a wireless hardware device that can render an in-browser Ground Control Station on any smartphone, tablet or PC. This "magic box" will be a wireless router between your aircraft and the display device of your choice, as well as driving a tracking antenna and providing datalogging. It's the ultimate cross-platform GCS! Just imagine controlling your UAV via an iPad or even an Andoid phone. This device will make it easy--no software required. Projected Release: Q2

More Pre-Made autopilots and UAVs

At the DIY Drones store, we only sell components and kits. But our partners around the world are gearing up to sell pre-made autopilots and even ready-to-fly UAVs. You can already buy an ArduCopter with pre-soldered APM electronics from FahPah, but you'll see more in that vein from FahPah and others early this year. The marketplace has spoken clearly on this--not everyone wants to have to use a soldering iron or load code to use a UAV--and DIY Drones partners are responding. Projected Release: Q1

On the code side, expect the versions we release this year to increasingly do auto-detection of hardware and otherwise require less setup. Our ambition for 2011: make UAVs as close to plug-and-play as possible. You can hack APM all you want, but if you don't want to see a line of code you don't have to.

Other cool stuff

The above is just a taste of what we've got in the pipeline. Other products that are in the prototyping stage including open source On-Screen-Display boards (including integrated with APM), open source ESC, smartphone interfaces, new GPS modules, ground rover autopilots and more!

Hello everyone,
a year and a half ago came Multipilot 1.0 an inertial platform for applications and semi-professional hobby. After the excellent results obtained from the marketing of these cards, and participation in development projects as open source and Aeroquad Arducopter and 'born www.virtualrobotix.com community.
Today our community is proud to present the evolution of our project: Multipilot 2.0 ST.

The characteristics of Multipilot 2.0 are:

• Hardware:
  • Arm 3 Cortex processor STM32F103VET6. 72 Mhz
  • Flash 512 Kbytes RAM 64 Kbytes
  • 16-bit Timer 4
  • SPI 2 (ADC Interface, MicroSD connection)
  • I ² C 2 (First I2C (sensor), Second I2C control until ESC 12)
  • USART 5 (GPS, DEBUG Console, XBee Pro Telemetry)
  • USB 1 (Upload Firmware, Debug Console, Power Board for Debug)
  • CAN 1 (Interconnection with Professional ESC 1 Mbit update rate)
  • 6 PWM Output Bit 16 (ESC / Servo Control)
  • 8 PWM Input 16 Bit (RC Input Channel, accept PPM SUM)
  • 8 Analog Input 12 Bit.
  • Professional 4 layers PCB.
  • DC: DC 30 V (6s Lipo): 5 volts and 3.3 volts
• Sensor Board:
  • Diydrones OilPan . (High quality entry level board)
  • LN Professional Sensor Board: 3 Axis Accelerometer, 3 Axis Gyroscope, 3 Axis Magnetometer , 10 HZ Gps , High Quality Sensor for certify professional application.
• IDE and Development tools:
  • Arduino IDE.
  • Arm GCC Toolchain.
  • Fully compatible with arduino wiring language.
• Firmware:
  • On this platform will be available a lot of RC library developed by Virtualrobotix and Diydrones community.
  • Standard software will be an improved revision of Arducopter , Ardupilot , Multiwii , Aeroquad . The first revision of code will be Arducopter NG .
  • MultiFox Rev 4 special Arm Edition.
• Special Feature :
  • Multipilot 2.0 is fully compatible with ArduPilotMega DiyDrones Board.
  • OEM revision of Multipilot 2.0 available.

Official Thread : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/multipilot-20-sample-will-be

if you need more information or want support this project contact me by pm or in skype at contact virtualrobotix

Kinect + Ros for Teleoperating Humanoid Robot
a great Job of Taylor Veltrop.

http://taylor.veltrop.com