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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 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.
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."
If they had even the slightest flair for the dramatic they would set up a page which tracks the plane's progress in real-time on a map from their satellite telementary system.
If you were around last year, you would know that they do. It's just not up yet, because the plane isn't "up" yet either.
Bitchslapped. Neat.
Eating/testing is the safest way of dealing with these menaces to society.
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!!!
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.
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....
>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