

Build your very own UAV drone spy plane - sparknlaunch
http://bordelon.net/ezstar.html

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bri3d
I believe this system was constructed in 2008/2009, which is impressive given
the nascent state of open-source drones at the time.

However, today, ArduPilot and Paparazzi are both fairly full-featured in terms
of supporting ground stations, waypoints/missions, and autoland,
MultiWii/PARIS is very cheap and stable for multirotors (albeit with a more
limited feature set), and OpenPilot is developing rapidly. All are open-source
and they all use real sensor fusion and stabilization code rather than some
sort of Kalman-filter free special sauce like this guy.

It's truly amazing how far we've come in just a few years - ten years ago a
small quadcopter would have been hard to imagine (due to a lack of decent
micro-sized IMUs as well as a lack of easily-obtainable large high-density
LiPos), five years ago a project for only the brave, talented, and well-
backed, and now we can buy them as toys!

~~~
excuse-me
Pah - we had a guy doing this 70years ago with just a gyro compass and a prop
shaft counter.

And he managed to hit London most of the time.

~~~
josephcooney
This is kind of in poor taste.

~~~
quattrofan
But amusing and to an extent true.

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pserwylo
If you are interested in this, I strongly encourage you to watch Andrew
Tridgell's talk from linux.conf.au 2012:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML__e_ZcWiQ>. It was close to my favourite
talk at that conference.

From the youtube video: "This talk is all about the technology and techniques
that we have developed for building an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that can
search for and find a lost bushwalker in outback Australia"

Tridge is a great speaker, and discusses the nuances of this topic really
well.

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Ralith
> Instead of the usual Kalman filtering, I've devised my own IMU sensor fusion
> algorithm which is super easy to visualize and doesn't require a PHD in
> mathematics. Further, it works as well as the complex filters you'd find in
> the conventional approach.

I wonder what evidence he has for that. It sounds awfully suspect.

~~~
Qworg
I'd love to see his code and compare it side by side. Sadly, it appears he's
considering it proprietary.

~~~
Ralith
Which worsens its image further--"I've got an amazing new method better than
the scientists could come up with, but it's secret!" smells of incompetence at
best.

~~~
abstrakraft
Lay off the guy. The fact is that the Kalman filter applies to a very small
(arguably non-existent in the real world) set of estimation problems, and the
solutions that even the PhDs come up with are typically ad hoc and suboptimal.

That being said, there's really not much to his solution - he's relying on
gravity (from accelerometer) and magnetometer data to provide most of the
orientation information. The IMU really isn't doing much, and I can't see how
this works well during maneuvers.

EDIT: Note that's the _actual_ Kalman filter. Most of the time when people say
KF, they really mean Extended Kalman Filter, which is an approximation to the
real thing. Optimality goes out the window when you approximate.

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mikeevans
If you're interested in UAVs and looking for other resources, I'd suggest
<http://diydrones.com/>.

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konstruktor
Can anybody explain to me how he can legally use amateur radio bands to
communicate with this drone? He is a licensed ham, but the device is neither a
beacon nor a repeater (and both would need a callsign, at least where I live).

~~~
bri3d
FCC 97.215 [0] makes it legal for a ham to transmit up to 1W in any band
they're licensed for for the purpose of model aircraft control, without any
callsign identification being necessary.

0: <http://www.arrl.org/part-97-amateur-radio>

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gouranga
I reckon legislation will soon fall which makes these illegal unless you are
law enforcement or military. If it makes either party potentially more
accountable then it's going to cause problems.

Great piece of kit though!

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redwood
I'd love to see el-wire glowing drone "night birds" flying around at night @
Burning Man

