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11-Pound Model Plane Vs. The Atlantic, Again
Luap Nanreffeh writes "Last year, (/. Story 1, /. story 2) Maynard Hill and some retired NASA buddies tried to set a record for flying a model aeroplane across the atlantic ocean (from Newfoundland to Ireland). Their plan, using GPS, onboard controllers, and a gallon of gas, would have been the first to cross the Atlantic under FAI rules. They didn't have much luck last year, but now they're at it again. The first launch should be tonight."
all of us from slashdot send Charles "Lucky Hammy" Hamster our support.
good luck and godspeed, brave hamster.
Mike
instead of giving an exact date, just waiting until weather conditions are perfect to fly it?
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
So, how long until drug runners send little planes from Columbia to Florida?
This gives me too many ideas...
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
...my neighbor tried to make his toy remote control car across the street, only to be crushed by the UPS guy.
So this is what a job market over-saturated with people with degrees and experience produces?
Or maybe they were just tired of people laughing when they told people that they worked for NASA.
-Valiss
Get in touch with the English Channel skydiver and set up a cross promotion: Skydiver Flies (and Flies Model Plane) Across Atlantic.
Q. Which reminds me of an old joke: what do you get when you cross the Titanic and the Atlantic Ocean?
A. About halfway.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
They much rather the use of big planes like L1011s and 747s. These much larger aircraft have proven to be far more reliable than tiny drones. Additionally, the larger craft are capable of carrying much larger loads which is a very important feature to the highly competitive drug trade. Basically, if the transport can't handle a ton or more of product, the more respected cartels won't touch it.
Drug Smuggling anyone? Or maybe strong encryption smuggling. Can't be radar visible if it's that small.
I went to battle MC Escher, but drew a blank
They forgot to add in the additional weight of the coconuts.
Bowie J. Poag
Yeah, what onboard sensors would be those, intuition and luck?
The engineering experience gained from this endeavor will only help humans create better autonomous craft for Earthbound and space-based uses. Glad they're doing this, and I wish them luck, although if they see any German guys with ladders in their backyard, get the ol' shotgun ready.
Why don't they just build a dozen of these, and launch them an hour apart. The whole advantage of small inexpensive craft is the "swarm" approach.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I set get in.... CLICK
You know you're reading Slashdot when "GPS" and "FAI" are assumed to require less background info than "Newfoundland".
In the news today a nearly blind and deaf man was arrested for terrorist acts after his home built guided missile traveled the atlantic and started a fire at a shoreside housing complex, a terrorized elderly couple lost 16 cats in the fierce blaze.
So this is a automatous GPS-guided long-range flying vehicle? Isn't that a cruise missle?
Admittedly, there would be some scaling up before poeple could fit a 2000lb warhead on it. But for bio/chemical WMDs, here's your cheap unstoppable delivery device.
I wish them luck, regardless.
All in all, I was much more impressed by the Balloon 1.0 project, even though an unpowered balloon isn't half as cool as a powered and automatically guided RC aircraft travelling such a huge distance unaided.
Does anyone have any good links for other projects in a similar vein which aren't so coy about the gory technical details?
A potential terrorist device?
I can see it now. Our next military campaign will be to eradicate model airplane building materials from the rest of the globe.
"The airplane(s) we launch this month will be called 'The Spirit of Butts Farm' - Check back later to learn why."
Sounds to me like a blatant ploy for sponsorship dollars from RIM. . .
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
After they make the flight and decide to sell the plane:
"So, you boyus used to work for NASA, huh?"
"Yep."
"Well I dont really know if this is the kind of plane I'm looking for. You say it get's 3,000 miles per gallon?
"About that."
"I'm really in the market for something that gets more like 4,000 miles to the gallon. Plus it looks real used, what with all the bird crap and scratches on it. I'll give ya 50 bucks."
"But we made a world record with this!!"
"Yeah but the paint is chipped. 60 bucks is my final offer."
"Fine, we'll take it. There's oour retirement!"
-Valiss
I guess lack of vocabulary never stopped you from opening your mouth,eh?
aeroplane
\A"["e]r*o*plane`\, n. [A["e]ro- + plane.] (A["e]ronautics) A light rigid plane used in a["e]rial navigation to oppose sudden upward or downward movement in the air, as in gliding machines; specif., such a plane slightly inclined and driven forward as a lifting device in some flying machines; hence, a flying machine using such a device. These machines are called monoplanes, biplanes, triplanes, or quadruplanes, according to the number of main supporting planes used in their constraction. Being heavier than air they depend for their levitation on motion imparted by one or more propellers actuated by a gasoline engine. They start from the ground by a run on small wheels or runners, and are guided by a steering apparatus consisting of horizontal and vertical movable planes. There are many varieties of form and construction, which in some cases are known by the names of their inventors.
"Oh, wait, 11 *pounds*? Damn, we did all our calculations for an 11 *kilo* plane!" (sound of a spash)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
From the website: "The airplane(s) we launch THIS month will be called "The Spirit of Butts Farm"
No, I'm not making that up. Check it yourself, if it's not slashdotted already.
It really helps to read the article before posting and looking like a fool. They have multiple planes.
3000 miles per gallon? not bad
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
RT(F)A (don't know why I even bother saying that). They have backups (3 last time, unk how many this time, but at least 1 based on the pictures page)
These days we ignore anything larger than an eagle on radar, under the premise that any plane of war would be masked to appear much smaller.
This plane will be shot down before it leaves US waters.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Anyone else think this article was talking about seriously underweight fashion model consuming the Atlantic ocean?
Exactly WTF is an "aeroplane"? I've heard of an "airplane" before... is this some sort of strange dialect?
I believe it's the original form, still in common use in some English-speaking countries, of which "airplane" is an American English contraction.
(But I'm sure somebody can correct me if I'm wrong. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... than small ceramic antennae and lightweight electronics? :)
Can't be radar visible if it's that small.
I believe that's why the Lear Fan private jet model was aborted.
Made mostly of composites, with the biggest single piece of metal being the spindle of the Jet and the bulk of the metal being the avionics, it had such a small radar cross-section that it didn't show up on airport search radar until it was actually over the field...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
a) Adjust for wind, which messes up distance calculations
b) Adjust for deviations in the magnetic compass as a result of proximity to the earth's magnetic pole
c) Figure out where the plane ended up assuming it actually gets to the other side of the pond
Of course, maybe you just have a different notion of what constitutes a "simple instrument".
'd think more geeks would be into it, especially with all the equipment you get to work with.
But DANG would this be an expensive hobby! If you can get some financial backing or sponsorship it would be ok. But that's a lot of high quality, lightwight devices. And we all know that
high quality + heavy = expensive. And
high quality + small and light = super-expensive!
And the thing that really gets me, is that once you load up your huge investment into a tiny plane, you send it out to its almost certain destruction!
Now I'll spend money on something I'm going to improve on and keep for a long time. But dropping cash on a big project like this would be like shooting $100 bills into the ocean.
Without a better success rate, you'd have to be a drug smuggler just to afford the little marvels.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Luck to the project - a bit like long-distance amateur radio contacts with just a few mW of transmitted power, just pushing the limits of what can be done.
Simple to do as you describe...yes
Simple to do under the rules governing weight of the craft? Now there's the challenge.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Eating/testing is the safest way of dealing with these menaces to society.
You thought wrong.
Doing it so it falls under the FAI rules is definitely non-trivial. In this case the model is defined by FAI limits of 5Kg with a span of 2M and a length of 2M, the engine is limited to 10cc (OS 60 4s).
Matthew
What is FAI (Football Association of Ireland?) and what rules do they have governing this?
Some poor Irish guy is gonna be standing on the beach all alone, get nailed in the head with a model plane, and get REALLY confused.
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
That's how they are getting to the moon.
Laws are for people with no friends.
"Geeze, a self-directed, small plane capable of flying the atlantic is *sooo simple*. one could even be built to carry reasonable payload of some kind if one wished."
As evidenced by the large number of these planes making this flight daily.
"Derp de derp."
by that logic, let's just toss paper airplanes across. One of them HAS to get through eventually :P
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
They forgot to add in the additional weight of the coconuts.
The problem wasn't that they forgot. The problem was that one engineer used Metric Coconuts and another engineer used British Standard Coconuts.
[Whistle] Foul on the play. Trying to combine two obscure, geek references.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
A ready-for-consumers GPS fits in a fricking PC card now, with a small antenna sticking out the side. You can remove the need for a bulky antenna by using a fractal antenna etched into a PC board. I imagine there are one or two chip solutions for GPS nowadays.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Based on the first two responses to this post, you'd think people had never heard of inertial navigation. With MEMS accelerometers it ought to be pretty light, too.
Isn't LORAN run by the USCG?
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
Trying to integrate the output of an inertial sensor twice to get position IS dead reckoning. For very short travel times, it would work fine - but for very long flights, the integrated noise from the sensor output would give you enormous accumated position and velocity errors.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
..They're already REALLY confused...
Seamus and Murphy were walking in the woods when they came across a sign saying, "Tree Fellers wanted". So Murphy said, "Ye know, it's a damn shame Paddy isn't here. We could have gotten that job."
PS: I'm sorry.
If only the feature were built into slashcode
The unofficial
11 lb, 1 Gallon of "gas" - I wish that the ./ editors would make at least some attempt at acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of the world uses metric units. For "news for nerds" site, you'd hope that if nothing else, they'd make an attempt at least at being scientific (even the US uses metric units in all science).
And some people in Europe complain about US arrogance. Arrogance? What arrogance?
Here's a company that sells all equipment necessary to autonomously fly a model plane. Obviously you can define several GPS coordinates, and the plane will go pass them all.
http://www.micropilot.com/
Here's an open-source effort to autonomously fly a helicopter. Heli's are more difficult to manouver than planes.
http://autopilot.sourceforge.net/
if he's standing on the beach instead of sitting in a bar.
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Be sure to tip your waitress.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Yeah, we have heard of them.... except that most inertial units nowadays use GPS too, you know you goota get some sort of reference for your error and drift. Most new inertial units combine the accelerometers and gyroscopes to give you altitude, pitch and yaw, plus acceleration, plus GPS to combine that into the Kalman to get rid of dead reckoning.
It is a tad hard thing to do when you do not have a human navigator on board to do the corrections....
From the FAQ:
Q. Can this be loaded with five pounds of weight in the nose?
Yes, it can be, but why would one want to do that and launch it across the ocean?
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Did they fire frozen chickens at it to make sure it would survive a bird hit?
A DIY Cruise MIssile
"Watch me build one for under $5000."
I was reading some of their documents, and I did not find a specific definition of the rules for this type of aircraft.
There was a UAV which crossed the Atlantic years ago. It was designed and built by a collaborative effort betwen the Insitu Group, and the University of Washington's AA department (my alma matter).
I'm just wondering if there are additional restrictions under FAI rules for the vehicle.
Yeah, I know .sig responses are lame, but...
ROFLMAO. YMMV. TYVM. HAND.
Really. Brilliant.
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
The relevant FAI is the Federation Aeronautique Internationale. The aeromodelling page is here; world records are available here.
I thought anyone with a few bucks and a few days could do that kinda thing no problem? Why would a bunch of retired NASA guys be wasting there time with this? Geeze, a self-directed, small plane capable of flying the atlantic is *sooo simple*. one could even be built to carry reasonable payload of some kind if one wished.
This thing is probably just a tad slower than a cruise missile. In fact, several tads.
.
I mean, this is just a friggin' airplane. You scale it up to carry a 2000lb warhead, and you're gonna start needing a much larger and sturdier body, wings, fuel tank, and engine . .
'Scaling' this would still just be giving you a vehicle with the capability of a personal airplane. It's going to be pretty slow, very expensive (given that even gutless airplanes generally cost around $500k), and it will show up on radar unless you make it even more expensive -- meaning that the army would have plenty of time to shoot it down if they were so inclined.
It still has potential, but the longer the range, the more speed becomes an issue (can be targetted, blown up). I don't see it being very practical or widely applicable -- it might undercut cruise missiles on cost, but it would be so very ineffective militarily that I don't see this being all that important. I see it being more applicable to things like unmanned air cargo planes.
For $3000 a shot, it won't take you from Columbia to Florida.
I demand that this "petrol" you speak of be referred to as "benzin" as it is in the proper German you insensitive clod.
Please mod parent down to troll... sigh
Piloted airplanes had a much higher than 10% success rate, especially since they could fly 10 feet over the water which is below radar altitude, and there were enough guys willing to risk a couple years in jail in order to make a couple million dollars that the cartels could simply do auctions on cocaine delivered to Florida or South Carolina, and could write off the airplanes after they got to the US.
It was an amazing, amazing economic time, with far more leverage than the high-tech business ever had, simply because the stupid US drug laws created market conditions with a 1000% profit margin, unlimited-demand unsaturated market, ready supply (suppliers were also making a few thousand percent profit margin), small quantity of material to move, and a one-shot deal could get you all the disco and babes you wanted to retire on as long as you weren't stupid enough to sample the merchandise or greedy enough to try to rip off your business partners. (And if you didn't think you'd made enough on one trip, it was still pretty safe and undetectable to make a second one, at which point you've made as much extra money as you'd have gotten by ripping off your partners, and nobody goes after you with a chainsaw.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sure, it's definitely cool to cross the Atlantic - you've basically got one shot, win or lose. But I'd think they'd first try to get it across North America on land, so if something goes wrong they can get some information out of it rather than just knowing roughly where it sank in the ocean.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hey, it sounds faster than avian carriers, though perhaps less reliable....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Atlantic: You dare challenge me again, little 11-Pound Model Plane? Your whirly propeller is no match for my spinning hurricanes of doom.
11-Pound Model Plane: My light weight allows me to cross great distances! You shall not stop me!
Atlantic: WTF? I'm the freaking Atlantic Ocean. Come here you little punk ass 11-Pound Model - wha?
Gecko: Excuse me. Did you know you can save 15% or more on your car insurance by switching to Geiko?
Atlantic: Impressive, green one!
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
And that's exactly what they need to make this flight.
Now I don't mean to be a Negative Nancy, but I do know a thing or two about aircraft design. If they want this thing to go very far on very little fuel, they will need a very high aspect ratio wing. They have a standard model wing on it!
They need something that looks like a U-2 spyplane.
I believe that we as humans do not have the right to own atoms of matter. We also don't have the right to own segments of our planet, and all things on that segment, since they also are made of atoms of matter.
This doesn't mean I am going to let you take my computer, car, home, land, or any other item that the government and society say I own. And if in the future the government and society choose to say I don't own them, 'because atoms want to be free', they will have a hard time forcing their idiotic set of beliefs on me.
You can't seem to handle the difference between what is a right, and what we as humans will do because we are humans. By the way, there is no 'innate moral centre' that precludes eating. And in my personal beliefs, all living organisms are just as deserving of kindness and compassion, not just the 'cute ones' like hamsters, dogs, cats, and bunnies. To me, you are still living in the grey area between barbarism and civility, with your pick-and-choose compassion.
Just change the spec to 400 miles range
>Based on the first two responses to this post, you'd think people had never heard of inertial
>navigation. With MEMS accelerometers it ought to be pretty light, too.
Pure 3 axis inertial navigation with a strapdown inertial measuring requires extreme precision. MEMS inertial units aren't even in the right ballpark. Mechanical stable platform inertial systems that actually rotated inside the vehicles didn't require awesomely accurate sensors, but they are big, heavy, and not as reliable.
It is a useful programming exercise to write a simulation of a strapdown inertial system and play with bias, noise, and nonlinearity errors (add cross axis coupling and acceleration effects for micromachined gyros for bonus points). Pick reasonable ranges and quantize to 12 bits, then integrate at 100 hz or so. You can start the simulation motionless, but in a minute it will be cruising along at 60 mph in some random direction, hundreds of feet from the start position. An hour later, it will be heading for Mars.
The low end inertial systems that have been moderately soccessful are done by removing gravity from the equation and just doing 2D navigation, and often using other sensors, like magnetometers instead of rate gyros for heading, or odometer readings instead of double integrating accelerometers. Double integration of interrelated noisy sensors with an implicit 1G acceleration is really more demanding than it would initially seem.
The only reason you wouldn't want to use GPS in an ocean crossing is if you are afraid a Bad Guy might be jamming the signals.
John Carmack
Nice to see him keep up with his passions.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
But DAMN that (tam.plannet21.com) has got to be the UGLIEST web site I know of. Check it out. I hope this means that they spent all of their effort on the plane ;^)
Maybe if two planes held the coconut bewteen them on a string....
That's why it still works!!! The USCG used to be funded by the DOT now it has the never ending supply of money from the dept. of HD.....
such is life...
More info about this, please?
The project reminds me of this project. (Building a home made cruise missile)
But Imagine the possibilities what terrorists could do if they get hold of the plans to this "model plane".
It seems that somebody already successfully sent a model plane across the atlantic ,
and
although I don't know what "under FAI rules" means.
So now, terrorists can target most places in the world pretty safely. I wonder if this scenario has been taken into account by the Pentagon and what they can do about it.
Yeah, and what do you know Mr "Carmack", I doubt you know how to program a realistic physics engine :) (please don't send the goons with the rail guns around...shotguns and rockets I can handle, but not the railguns, or the jumpy jumpy nonsense)
Seriously though, where are you learning this stuff from, I had a quick look for intertial guidance and MEMS (not such a sensible idea in these TIA times) but I only got the encyclopaedia answers.
BB
>>Seriously though, where are you learning this stuff from, I had a quick look for intertial guidance and MEMS (not such a sensible idea in these TIA times) but I only got the encyclopaedia answers.<<
Google the archives of Armadillo Aerospace on gyros and IMU's. You'll get quite a good overview of the stuff.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
...they were so coked off their heads they wanted you to know how great they were...
Yes, they need to teach some of the robosharks to do the pickup.
o boshark.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/devon/outdoors/nature/2003/r
No AWACS, no sonars, nothing will pay attention. Except Baywatch perhaps.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
their web site totally sucks and it only has two freakin' pictures! what the! damn you aol easy builder, DAMN YOU TO HELL!!!!
fact: microsoft > linux
It's that what we are doing now - marking dupes with "again" ?
Realize that even as reliable as GPS is, satellites can give false information. There's a system to counteract this problem, called RAIM, but it requires 4 birds to be visible to detect a problem, and 5 to remove the faulty signal from nav calculations, assuming you have a redundant, GPS-compatible, digital barometric altimeter on board. Otherwise, you need 6 birds visible.
Guidance seems to be relatively straightforward: figure out where you are (with 95% confidence), and aim toward your next waypoint. Here's a quick overview of what that entails:
- Determine lat/lon for you and the waypoint
- Determine true (ground) course
- Determine magnetic course after correcting for the aforementioned deviation
- Determine magnetic heading after correcting for wind
- Determine compass heading after correcting for onboard instrument magnetic interference
- Issue commands to the flight control system to head that way
The wind correction is non-trivial. Last I checked, winds in the flight route were generally sustained at around 15 knots, and varied by a full 180 degrees relative to the course. This plane flies at about 40 knots. Grabbing a calculator and doing some trig, wind correction could be as much as arctan(15/40) = 20 degrees. Onboard interference is typically up to 10 degrees in GA aircraft. Here's a concrete example: if you want to fly due east (090) in the North Atlantic with a 45 degree deviation and winds from the south at 15 knots, with onboard interference of +10 degrees, you'd have to fly a compass heading of 165! That's almost due south.That leaves flight controls. You need to maintain proper attitude, keeping in mind that there's gonna be turbulence. In order for any magnetic navigation system to properly realigned (remember gyroscopic precession?), you need to be flying straight and level, which requires extensive compensation for unsteady flight dynamics. It's not as simple as saying "pitch up" when your speed gets too high or your altitude is too low. What if you get inverted? It can happen. Even human pilots don't do so well flying instruments only -- see the NTSB findings in the JFK junior crash. Maintaining stability and control over dynamical systems is a hard problem, which is why many colleges offer entire majors in CDS.
Disclaimer: I am a Space Shuttle enthusiast and a student pilot (hopefully, that will change in two weeks). I know that NASA have the expertise to overcome these problems, and I'm willing to give these engineers the benefit of the doubt. I wish them good weather and no system malfunctions.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Model airplanes don't kill people - hamsters kill people!
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
Methinks your simulations may have been a bit pessimistic. I use 3-axis IMU's frequently, and find the local errors to be very reasonable. Even without basic filtering, you can see locally smooth motion for good stretches of time.
Of course, the long term error is unbounded, making it more or less useless for a transatlantic flight. You need to incorporate other global positioning sensing techniques with bounded absolute error to do reasonable global positioning. Combining the data of these two kinds of sensors is nontrivial, but the basic methods are well documented.
The only reason you wouldn't want to use GPS in an ocean crossing is if you are afraid a Bad Guy might be jamming the signals.
Agreed. There's no reason I can see that they can't live with errors on the order of 10's of meters.
This project is much more interesting. $5000, that's the price of a third-hand car. How many of these puppies can an Al-Qaeda-like organisation build ?
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.