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MIT's Acrobatic Helicopter
YourHero writes: "MIT has a new toy, a remotely-piloted helicopter that's agile, stable, and in the current public mood, perfect for urban combat and reconnaisance and surveying disaster sites. Oh, and it's also good for aerial photography. It's so good that it even does 360-degree aileron rolls at the flick of a switch. The release gives some basics, videos and other juice are here.
This cost $40k, excluding labor, because technically, student labor is "priceless" - so a nod to Kara Sprague, Alex Shterenberg, Ioannis Martinos, Bernard Mettler, and Vlad Gavrilets, who probably provided most of the labor. Stringfellow Hawk has not been reached for comment."
Check out the IARC competition website. There are teams' webpages linked from there, too. My school (UT Austin) is planning its first ever entry for the 2002 competition. .60 Gas Graphite by Miniature Aircraft USA).
The task this year is to fly 3 kilometers along 4 waypoints, identify a building and an open entrance on the building, deploy a subvehicle (not necessary, but practically necessary) through the entrance, and have the subvehicle return reconaissance to the judges 3km away.
Many people opt to use R/C helicopters and modify them (we are using an XCell
As stated above, its been done and for a LOT cheaper. Yes I read the information and its a little different, but not really... Most modern advanced radio controlled heli's (just like this one) are simple enough to fly with some practice and are all computer controlled already. I can make my helicopter do a loop and a roll without me doing anything but flicking a switch. Its very simple with the computer radios and some simple commands input into the radio. Yes, its stable and I have used my heli to take pictures too. Total cost to me so far ~$2500.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
You can buy an X-cell 60 Chopper, build it, and fly it without the aid of MIT researchers for less than $2k., including aerobatics.
I just thought I would add that bit of information since landing and takeoff of radio controller helicopters are arguably the most difficult thing to learn to do.
Also, companies have produced camera/camcorder mounts for these types of helicopters too.
Are the voices in my head bothering you?
Uhmm.. did you not notice that DoD funded this little doodad? Naturally the military is all over this like white on rice. Hollywood is another natural application, (let's see, who has deep pockets and likes dramatic film footage?)
But what else?
Unmanned traffic enforcement choppers a la those annoying photo radar rigs parked on the roadside? With a cop at the "wheel" does this get around the arguments facing the purely automated variety?
Most fun application: Obstacle course racing. Smack one up and sure it was several grand but substantially more exciting than Robotica.
Dan FitzGerald Network Analyst and Wannabe Hacker KC0CZM (2m & 440 in NJ)
Ailerons is easier to say than "Left or Right Cyclic"
And in the case of R/C stuff, a lot of equipment is used in planes and helis, so it makes sense to use the same terminology.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
According to Dictionary.com an aileron is:
"Either of two movable flaps on the wings of an airplane that can be used to control the plane's rolling and banking movements."
Since a helicopter doesn't have ailerons, only a control rotor, this isn't, strictly speaking, an aileron roll; its more of a control rotor roll.
HELICOPTERS HAVE NO AILERONS!
I noticed that as well, odd they have it on the main site page too. Helicopters move the blade angles to achieve the same result. In case anyone is wondering Aileron 's are the little flaps* on the wing that move up or down to tilt the plane to make it bank or roll.
*They are not the FLAPS mind you, these are only used to provide more lift to the aircraft at slower speads.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
The 111 ejection capsule worked quite well on paper. The trouble is, the normal mission profile for 111's is mach 0.9+ at 200 feet, so that's how they ran training flights. If anything went wrong, there usually wasn't enough time between "oh shit" and going splat to reach for the ejection lever. Not to mention that one crew that either didn't notice the plane had flipped over, or it flipped over while they were pulling the lever.
In the one case I heard of where the crew did eject "within envelope" (that is, plane rightside up and before impact), the capsule did protect the crew quite well. This was over Scotland; they just walked over to the road, got a ride to the pub, and called the base...
At Cannon AFB where I spent 6 years, they lost a plane every year or two. The only time the crew got out was when the plane caught fire on the runway, and they didn't eject (the system didn't work under 60 knots), but rather popped the canopy and jumped over the side. I think that was a 10-12 foot drop, but they came out of it running, because the JP4 burned hot enough to ignite aluminum.
You know the AF's sequence for junking an airplane? (1) Buy all new test stations for the avionics, at a cost of at least $100 million. (2) Junk the aircraft the new test stations support -- in the case of Cannon, one year after they arrived. (3) Next year, fight the war Cannon had been trained for (Iraq), using other, more expensive planes to penetrate the defenses. 8-(
okay, I'm getting a little off-topic here, but traffic helicopters are obsolete already. Here in Philadelpha most if not all of the stations have given up on them (or use them just for special reports on things best covered from the air).
Most traffic reports are coming from a service such as traffic.com, who places cideo cameras and radar guns along the highways to measure speeds.
The major benefit of this system is the newscasters can show the road conditions of several highways in rapid succession.
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
and in the current public mood, perfect for urban combat
... ever, perhaps. The main march had, by NYPD estimates, over 14,000 participants -CNN said "hundreds"... sheesh. I was there, it was thousands. In several situations, the NYPD broke up peaceful gatherings and rallies, clubbed participants, and took them off in ambulances and paddywagons. Check out the coverage on http://www.indymedia.org.)
How would these helicopters help in such situations? They could be used to douse protesters with pepper spray and tear gas directly from above -no need to send police into a crowd anymore! How to distinguish those pesky so-called "free-speech" protesters from window-smashing anarchists? Just equip the copters with face recognition software! Officers can put their time to better use photographing crowd members' faces to feed back into the system!
Have an rowdy situation unfolding? Simply arm these copters with fletchers full of sleeping potion, and you can rest assured they'll be hauled off to the slam, where they belong!
(In New York City, this past Saturday we saw one of the largest turnouts for a global trade-related protest in
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
The Comanche does not have an ejection seat, but it does have airbags and an explosive cord in the window frames that blow out the side windows for easy escape. But the idea of escaping from helicopter crashes is that you are safer staying in the bird. The spinning rotor is allowed to freely rotate and becomes your parachute in the event of an engine failure and the entire structure from the landing gear to the seats have "crumple zones" designed in to absorb the impact. So don't jump out of your helicopter unless you want to end up julienned!
Hugh (an ex-Sikorsky Aircraft employee)
The robustness of the controlling computer to the natural vibration of the chopper is what sets it apart.
The system was designed for *acrobatic flight*. It delivers on this goal by capturing flight data many times per second and integrating that into a flight dynamics model, which is in turn linked to the chopper's servo-control mechanisms. Right now, the only thing limiting its acrobatic flight capabilities is not the flight model, but simply programming the manoeuvres in. This last task is almost insignificant in terms of difficulty, when compared to the challenges of the vibration dampening system, systems integration, and flight dynamics model development.
patiwat@sloan.mit.edu