Festo has demonstrated it's capabilities again. No flying dolphin this time, no flying jellyfish, ...

Original post by : Kris Nackaerts www.diydrones.com

Dr Saud Abdul Ghani, head of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Qatar University, unveiled a design and construction of an artificial cloud to shade and cool the open playgrounds to be used in the 2022 World Cup in Doha. He told a local Arabic daily that the project will be executed in collaboration with Qatar Science and Technology Park.

He said the artificial cloud will move by remote control, made of 100 percent light carbonic materials, fuelled by four solar-powered engines and it will fly high to protect direct and indirect sun rays to control temperatures at the open playgrounds.

He said the initial model of the cloud cost $500,000 but the cost will decrease upon launching the commercial models which could also be used at beaches, car parking by using the mobile phone.

The Peninsula

Here is a picture of my quadcopter in its current setup.

Hi,

I just signed up for an account on this page. Roberto has asked me to write a bit about my quadcopter project and perhaps help out with some of the ChibiOS related aspects of his MP32 project. I have written about this on DIYDrones in the past, but I will try and highlight some of the main aspects here.

The hardware setup is as follows:

• Homemade aluminium frame consisting of u-channels and a CF base plate with bent wire hangers as landing gear
• Alpha 370 size motors (HobbyPartz), bolted directly to the frame
• Salvaged 6dof sensor board from a Walkera XUFO 5 (4?) OR homemade sensor board made of unsoldered HobbyKing HBK401(sp?) gyros and a Sparkfun 3-axis accelerometer
• 2-axis magnetometer (I know, 3 axes would make my life a little easier)
• Maxbotix sonar range finder for low-altitude hold
• Locosys LS20031 GPS or DIYDrones Mediatek GPS
• Modified ADNS2620 optical mouse sensor for low-altitude position-hold
• 72Mhz RC gear (Futaba TX, generic RX)
• XBee telemetry downlink
• Oh, yes: taped on keychain-camera for onboard video ;-)

The electronics setup consists of an ETT STM32 stamp module (Futurlec) which runs custom flight software written in C. The board contains an ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller with 64K of RAM and 512K of flash rom. The board itself runs at 3.3V, but the inputs are 5V tolerant. Here is a picture of the chaotic electronics setup:

The flight software makes use of ChibiOS for setting up the hardware and implementing multithreaded control and navigation tasks. In particular, the current version runs 4 threads concurrently:

• A high priority thread which runs the main loop generating the attitude estimates from gyro, accelerometer and magnetometer readings and generates the PID controls. The inner loop runs at ~400Hz - this is with a 2ms sleep cycle included (i.e. it could run at most @500Hz)
• A lower priority task which reads and parses GPS data (NMEA for the Locosys GPS, binary for the Mediatek unit) and generates high level navigational commands for the main loop
• A lower priority task which reads serial data from my custom-built mouse-sensor optical flow detector - this also generates navigational commands for the main loop
• A lower priority task that reads pressure data from an I2C based BMP085 barometric pressure sensor

The attitude estimation is done using quaternions and a DCM-like algorithm for drift compensation (it is not exactly DCM  - there is no cosine matrix with the quaternion approach; the underlying idea for drift compensation is similar, however). Other things that happen concurrently (in a preemptive sense) with the 4 threads above, but which are not implemented as ChibiOS threads, are:

• Gyros, accelerometers and magnetometer are sampled via the ARM's ADC circuitry. The readings are filled into a circular buffer via DMA (this is easy to set up with ChibiOS) and averaged over in the main loop as a crude low-pass filter
• The RC receiver pulses are read via pin-change interrupts to measure the PWM pulse lengths (I am using a bit of a hack here by reading 6 channels with only 4 pins - this relies on the fact that the pulses of most RC receivers are spaced concurrently in time, so one can infer every other pulse, e.g. number 2,  by looking at the end of, e.g. pulse 1 and the beginning of pulse 3)
• The sonar readings are also read as PWM via a pin-change interrupt.
• The PWM outputs for the 4 motors are hardware-generated (the ARM core can generate up to 4 independent PWM outputs per timer) - this is also set up via ChibiOS.

The way in which the 3 navigational threads communicate with the main loop thread is rather crude at the moment by setting global variables for pitch and roll of the quad. Most of this code is more of proof-of-concept quality rather than trying to make a generic code framework. The code itself is developed under Linux using a gcc cross-compiler toolchain compiled from sources. I also wrote a very simple graphical ground station software in Perl/Tk which displays a 3D model of the quadcopter and some other debugging info. The telemetry link at this point is a downlink only, in order to change anything the quadcopter has to be plugged in and a new firmware has to be uploaded.

Here is a video of the quad flying, demonstrating the position-hold capability via the mouse optical-flow sensor:

Anyways, that's all for now, let me know if you have any thoughts/questions.

Marko

Dear Friends,

Holger the Creator of Mikrokopter have setup a new benchmark . We need to work hard to improve our project :)

Great Job Holger , if you have an Multipilot1.0 or MK FC 2.0-1 with navi you can check these new features.

http://www.virtualrobotix.com/page/multipilot-8-v10

He use on his fly control a 8 bit micro 644p the same of MP10 , the main difference is that he use only native code write in 'C' not use any kind of arduino wrapper ... so the code is very efficient .

The original Navy is based on a str91x the old version developed in 2006 of STM32 micro so with Multipilot 32 we have more power and possibility to break the barrier of 100 mhz in the next near future.

So now with MP32 we have more power available than in Mikrokopter platform , the code from str91x is portable because we can use the same operating systems and tools , but not source code available for Mk Navy so we need to reinvent the code , better , more original and powerfull i hope :)

Check this docs : http://developers.stf12.net/just-another-eclipse-demo-str91x.

All the member of Arducopter team will be recived in the next days the MP32 , so we're ready to start :)

http://www.virtualrobotix.com/page/multipilot32-1

Best

Roberto

The robots are used to replace humans in dangerous environments, the mission of VirtualRobotix in my dreams is to find resources and to invent new technologies to make sure that what you see in this video will never happen again !

I'm delighted to announce the release of the first public beta of ArduPilot Mega 2.0. This is a significant upgrade to APM 1.02, and now delivers on full 2-way in-air communications, including real-time mission planning and autopilot control.

New features/changes include:

• --Full support for the MAVlink protocol, which is now APM's default communications method.
• --Auto-detection of GPS modules. No more requirement to tell APM what GPS module you're using--it will figure it out and configure the module appropriately!
• --2-way telemetry. Dozens of commands can now be sent from the Ground Station to the UAV while it's in the air. (see example from HK GCS at right)
• --2-way Mission Planning. You can script and change missions in real time while the UAV is flying!
• --Supports APM boards with the ATMega2560 chip, which has twice as much memory as the current board. The DIY Drones store will begin selling these new boards when the final version of APM 2.0 is released.
• --Magnetometer fully supported.
• --Current sensor fully supported
• --Support for the latest HK Ground Control Station and QGroundControl ground stations.
• --Mission Planning and configuration can now be done wirelessly. No need to use USB if you don't want to.
• --No more fiddling with a configuration file in Arduino! The software comes ready to go, right out of the box
• --New command-line tests allow you to check failsafe operation, Xbees, radio inputs and more.
• --New versions of HK GCS and the Mission Planner operate in MAVLink mode, allowing for wireless operation and compatibility with other MAVLink devices, including those running the Robot Operating System (ROS)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Huge props to the whole development team: Doug Weibel (project leader), Michael Smith, Jason Short, James Goppert, Michael Oborne (mission planner), Paul Mather (GCS), Lorenz Meier (MAVLink integration), Randy Mackay, Ryan Beall, Darren Corley, Joe Holdsworth, and countless others who have contributed with flight testing and bug catching!

As always, download the zip file, unzip it to your desktop. You will have two folders inside your APM 2.0 folder, as shown:

Make sure you're using the latest Arduino (0022). Set your Arduino Sketchbook location to the APM 2.0 folder, as shown below. You must exit Arduino and restart it for this to take effect. Within Arduino, open up the ArduPilotMega.pde file within the ArduPilotMega folder, and that will open all the other files. Before you compile, don't forget to select the right board (Arduino Mega 1280 or Arduino Mega 2560)

(Note: in the final version of APM 2.0, you will not have to use the Arduino IDE at all: the Mission Planner will load the firmware for you and check for more recent versions. The Arduino IDE will just be available in case you want to modify or inspect the code)

Remember that this is an initial beta release, so there may be bugs and undocumented bits. After the beta-testing period (usually about six weeks) we'll release APM 2.0 final version, and retire APM 1.02.

Additional instructions:

--If you're doing flight simulation with Xplane, instructions for doing it with APM 2.0 are here.

--Make sure you're using the latest Mission Planner and HK GCS. In the Mission Planner, make sure you select APM 2.x modes (MAVLink), shown at right.

Known issues:

1) Mission Planner won't write waypoints on Port 0 in HIL mode. Instead, write the waypoints via your Xbee (port 3); remember to change the Mission Planner baud rate to 57k when using the Xbee port.
2) Uploading mission commands is still not fully documented. We'll get to that this week
3) There may be some issues with datalogs not recording. We're looking into it.

4) The manual still describes the 1.02 software. We'll change that to 2.0 during the beta test period, so by the time we release the final of 2.0 the manual is fully updated.

5) This has been mostly tested with 900 Mhz Xbee modules and the XstreamBee adapter, which work great. However, there is an issue with the 2.4 Ghz Xbee modules, which have a slightly different hardware configuration that conflicts with that adapter when sending data upstream. A short term workaround is to solder a jumper from the adapter's CTS to V+ pin. The next version of these adapter boards will include a more graceful fix.

If you find any bugs, please file a report in the Issue Tracker. The dev team will not be responding to bug reports filed in blog comments

Arducopter 32 Roadmap presentation finished. Thank to all the member that join us.

This is the recording of presentation that i will be online for user that don't saw the presentation :

http://www.freebinar.com/WebConference/RecordingDefault.aspx?c_psri...

Sorry for technical problem that are doing during showing ... We can do better in future :)

During presentation i used freemind for eplain the complexity of the project I add to this post the original file .

In the next day i add it with more update

Best

Roberto

FreeMind File Download it and use Freemind program to view it

Link to Freemind program :

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Download

P.S.

if you see in the file some error or would propose some update contact me or resend updated file.

Hello Guys,
I am here for the latest update, I would say that many were waiting ... We are finally back to fly .. it starts from where I stopped with QuadFox V3, but now with much more power 'you can use to fly our beautiful quad.
What I posted and 'the first official flight after the failure of Sunday's pre-flight test due to malfunction of the GyroZ OilPan, promptly replaced by Jordi , thank you Chris and Jordi for your support ,Diydrones of which' was timely in sending, sent from the United States Sunday arrived today mounted and here is the first flight. Only preliminary tests. I used the firmware version published Sunday .I put new IMU and flies as I suggested no major problems except the ones I had already' seen in pre-flight test, but going to be solved improve some operations, particularly the libraries that I rewrote the management of the radio, the problem I have is' above them.
The test that I did use Arducopter NG 32, Multipilot32 as CPU, OilPan as IMU, ESC Chinese engines from 6 € robby recovered from my old mk, rx Graupner 12 ppm scan analog output sum .. 3S 20c Lipo Battery
I also remember that for those interested in doing another online seminar tomorrow on the product roadmap of Multipilot32. I predict that the stable version for standard users will be 'available within a month of work today. The actual and the 'pre alpha version only for Developer and Hard coder who know what they do when they hold a pre-review software.
If you wish to attend tomorrow night at 22.00 Make reservations on the link in such a way that will 'send an email invitation.

http://www.virtualrobotix.com/events/mp32-roadmap-presentation-and

Greetings
Roberto

Dear Friends,

today i recived 100 Multipilot32 CPU , in the next day will start to ship the Multipilot32 to DevCoreTeam and customers that are wayting it.

I'm very happy to start to work with your help at this greatfull project.

Tomorrow will present and discuss with you official roadmap of project. If you want to join us will be online with a Online Seminar from 22.00 (CET) Rome TIME.

Thanks for your collaboration :)

Best

Roberto

Dear Friends,

This is the link of Webinar : http://www.freebinar.com/virtualrobotix/ED57DE8381

about the Multipilot32 : IDE , Libary and  Operating system .

Best

Roberto