Hexacopter version or ArduPiratesNG code with GPS position and altitude hold, and ultrasonics low altitude hold.
More crazy stunts, including flips, in acro mode by Warthox
As always, follow the ArduPirates Vimeo channel for all the latest videos.
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Dear Friends,
after some time of evaluation of software architecture for Multipilot32 I decide to put on it a Real Time Operating Systems.
Instead of choose FreeRtos or other clone . I found this interesting operating system that yet support HAL .
Above there's an introduction of Chibi OS , what do you think about ? My idea is to rewrite the lib of our Arducopter project using a professional approach with a Realtime Kernel on low level OS call.
A video of Chibios User that develop his quadcopter ... :)
I'm waiting your feedback :)
This is official Discussion Thread : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/multipilot32-need-a-rt-os-what
Chibios Introduction :
This document will help you understand what ChibiOS/RT has to offer in a world with so many similar products.
Why another RTOS:
The first question to be answered is: there was really the need for yet another RTOS? There are several reasons:
- The ChibiOS/RT ancestor has been created more than 15 years ago and while it had far less features than the current product it was complete and functioning. ChibiOS/RT is just a new (and silly) name given to something created when there were not many free RTOSs around (actually none, at least none in my knowledge, there was no widespread Internet at that time).
- When, after a while, I needed a RTOS again, none of the existing FOSS projects met my expectations or my ideas of how a RTOS should be. I decided that work on that old project was a better idea than contribute to, or fork, something else.
- I wanted another toy.
How is different ?
Well, there are some design choices that should be explained and contribute to make ChibiOS/RT a peculiar design. Nothing really new in itself but the whole is interesting.
Not Just a scheduler.
While the ChibiOS/RT kernel can be used even alone, see the General Architecture document, the RTOS also offers other subsystems:
- Support for startup and board initialization.
- An HAL abstracting many common device drivers, see the Features Matrix.
- Integration with other open source projects like File Systems, Networking Stacks etc.
ChibiOS/RT is meant to be a whole operating system not just a scheduler.
Static Design.
Everything in the kernel is static, nowhere memory is allocated or freed, there are three allocator subsystems but those are optional and not part of core OS, dynamic services are built as a layer on top of the fully static kernel.
Safety is something you design in, not something you can add later, using memory allocation in the kernel is unnecessary and relying on that is just asking for trouble.
No Internals structure and tables.
The kernel has no internal tables, there is nothing that must be configured at compile time or that can overflow at run time, no upper bounds, the internal structures are all dynamic even if all the objects are statically allocated.
No error Condition.
System APIs have no error conditions, all the previous points are finalized to this objective. Everything you can invoke in the kernel is designed to not fail unless you pass garbage as parameters, stray pointers for examples. The APIs are not slowed down by parameter checks, parameter checks (and consistency checks) do exist but only when the related debug switches are activated.
All the static core APIs always succeed if correct parameters are passed. Exception to this rule are the optional dynamic APIs that, of course, can report memory exhausted.
Very Simple API.
Each API function should have the parameters you would expect for that function and do just one thing with no options.
Fast and Compact.
Note, first “fast” then “compact”, the focus is on speed and execution efficiency and then on code size. This does not mean that the OS is large, the kernel size with all the subsystems activated weighs around 5.5KiB (STM32, Cortex-M3), see the section ”Performance and Testing Data” for more details about performance and footprint.
It would be possible to make something even smaller but:
- It would be pointless, it is already really small.
- I would not trade efficiency or features in order to save few bytes.
Test and Metric.
I think it is nice to know how an OS is tested and how it performs before committing to use it. Test results on all the supported platforms and performance metrics are included in each ChibiOS/RT release. The test code is released as well, all the included demos are capable of executing the test suite and the OS benchmarks. See the section ”Performance and Testing Data” for more details about performance and footprint.
Dear Friends,
Ardupilot32 is Alive , I start to make some prototipe , the first to board assembled work fine , this week i don't prepare a video with a Weekly update because i'm working on a lot of thinks.
I'm working on IDE , On Bootloader , I'm working on Wrapper for Arduino compatibility, I'm working on testing hardware , the OilPan interface ... a lot lot of thinks ...
So I open a official repo with a raw code of my project ,some source code , ide that i'm using , some startup info ... I hope that for the next week i have some time to update doc and info on the board.
In the last two day I start t o upgrade the last revision of xduino for support Ardupilot32 , It'snt mature project .. don't support i2c , spi , pwm . But is a good point of start for my work.
If some one would help me That's is good , on the official thread you can found link to last code :
http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/multipilot-20-ap32-building
I need some help to write optimezed low level drive. Need Help for developing Ide plugin , Need Help for chosing better and cheaper platform for 16 Feb Podcast.
Regards
Roberto Navoni (FOX TEAM)
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.
Dear Friends,
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 :
This is the Official thread : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/multipilot-20-ap32-buildingThe 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
This is the link to forum thread: http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/open-source-brushless
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.
Cari Membri del FoxTeam ,
Cari Amici
Buon Anno per un 2011 pieno di tanti nuovi progetti e di tanti nuovi amici .... :)
Dear Members of FoxTeam,
Dear Friends
Happy New Year for a 2011 full of many new projects and new friends .... :)
Chers membres de FoxTeam,
Chers amis
Bonne année 2011 pour un plein de beaucoup de nouveaux projets et de nouveaux amis .... :)
Sehr geehrte Mitglieder des FoxTeam,
Liebe Freunde
Happy New Year für ein 2011 mit vielen neuen Projekten und neuen Freunden .... :)
亲爱的会员们的FoxTeam，
亲爱的朋友们
新年快乐了2011年许多新项目和新朋友充分.... ：）
The latest US purchase of Raven UAVs was announced:
"AeroVironment, Inc. (AV) (NASDAQ:AVAV) announced today that it received an order valued at $46,226,984 under an existing contract with the U.S. Army. The order comprises 123 new digital Raven small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and initial spares packages as well as 186 digital retrofit kits for the U.S. Marine Corps. The order also includes 339 digital retrofit kits for the U.S. Army."
Assuming that those "digital retrofits" are just switching out the video transmitters to encrypt the signal, which is not a big deal, this sounds like ~$300,000 per plane, which is about the same price as the similarly-sized Wasp.
I know that a Raven clone, APM and some decent video equipment is not quite milspec, but given that it costs about 1/1,000th as much and does more or less the same thing, why aren't the military considering cheaper alternatives?
(Yes, I'm aware the real Raven is much more robust, the onboard optics are much better, the Raven kits include ground stations and all that other stuff. But still: are they one thousand times better?)
Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12074162
Stay tuned :
This is the Official thread : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/multipilot-20-ap32-building