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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.
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!
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
"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.
Anyone else think this article was talking about seriously underweight fashion model consuming the Atlantic ocean?
'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.
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
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!!!
In my Oxford dictionary, it says;
Airplane US:Aeroplane
being from london, I would say most people say airplane and its pretty interchangeable without anyone moaning.
Paul.
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.
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.
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.
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....
Did they fire frozen chickens at it to make sure it would survive a bird hit?
Umm, no. Glocks are about 80% metal by weight, IIRC. They have always been easily seen by xrays. It's not like someone has invented composite ammunition, magazines, and barrels.
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
From the web site's FAQ:
What are the FAI rules for an aeromodel?
To qualify as an aeromodel under the rules for F3A, the plane must not exceed 5 kg (11 pounds), including fuel. The engine displacement may not exceed 10 cubic centimeters (0.61 cubic inches). There are also limits on the wing area and wing loading.
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.
>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
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.