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Micro Air Vehicles

Posted by michael on from the watch-out-for-frisbee-dogs dept.

Offwhite98 writes "Over at The Gainesville Sun they are running an article about really small planes used to watch all kinds of stuff. I am sure the common applications for these devices are pretty clear, but if you could use these for a lot of fun. Use 10 of them as flying candid cameras at a wedding or a party and you I am sure you will get interesting results." A little bigger than the Spy Fly but probably much more robust.

3 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Do it yourself UAV kit by tramm · · Score: 5, Informative
    Or you can build your own UAV with Free Software and a soldering iron... We're not quite ready to fly autonomously, but we do have a working inertial measurement unit, GPS navigation and control board. It's all GPLed and kits for the control board are available.

    http://autopilot.sourceforge.net/

    --
    -- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
  2. MAVs and MFIs by vortimax · · Score: 3, Informative

    robots.net frequently has articles on Micro Air Vehicles and Micromechanical Flying Insect robots. The Berkley MFI Project Overview is another good place to get more info.

  3. "Simple" solution... by alienmole · · Score: 3, Informative
    When looking at the world through a remote video camera without the benefit of an artificial horizon and other instrumentation, it's very easy to get a small model into a spin or spiral from which it is difficult to recover. Being able to directly see the model from the ground is the only safe way to ensure you can regain control in such situations.

    The problem is one of orientation -- once you lose view of the horizon through the camera it becomes very difficult to tell what your plane is doing -- thus very difficult to feed in the proper control corrections.

    What about automatic pilots, though? For example, the AeroVironment Black Widow, which is a six-inch aircraft, has "altitude hold, airspeed hold, heading hold, and yaw damping" (from the PDF available on their site).

    With bigger r/c vehicles, total autonomous flight was achieved a long time ago, even for helicopters, which are much more difficult to stabilize than planes. This can allow an operator to simply guide rather than actually pilot a vehicle, with greatly reduced chance of error.

    This already exists in commercial technology: there's an r/c helicopter, made by Honda iirc, used for applications like cropspraying and aerial photography. An operator can fly these with minimal training, because stabilization is automatic.