The CLAW

Worked on Solidwork rendering. Started updating proposal with the 6th Mission criteria. Examined possible visual confirmation equipment. A self-contained camera system, with built in object tracking would be suitable. This system would ensure the correct orientation of the grip to obtain the flash drive as well as ensure that the fake flash drive was not picked by accident.

Minor Experimentations

Examined possible grabbing mechanisms. Potential actuator systems include microservo motors or ‘biowire.’ Another key consideration is designing the system to deposit one item and picking up another. This will undoubtedly require the Quadrotor to maintain a stable hover without X-Y movement. In addition, a nonscientific experiment was conducted on the effect of smoke on ultrasonic sensors. The smoke particles and the change in temperature does not affect the sensor in relation to the resolution of the output (approximately +/- 1.25 cm). Another unscientific experiment was performed to evaluate the effect of the rotor thrust on a stack of papers with a flash drive on top. The results of this experiment suggests that a helicopter cannot approach the stack of papers without disturbing it unless it flies above the stack at least 1 m. However, once directly above the stack of papers, it may descend to landing without disturbing the papers. This behavior will be incorporated into the flight path design during the depositing and acquisition of the flash drives.

The Future is now! Flying spybots

IARC released the 6th mission. The 6th mission follows the 5th mission by requiring navigation in a crowded indoor environment. In addition, the UAV must be able to pick up and deposit a small object without being detected by roaming video camera surveillance. Due to the similarities between the two missions, the major characteristics of the proposed Quadrotor design do not require any changes. The addition of a small grabbing mechanism is all that will be required.

Quadcopter Validation!

Read through the competitors research papers. IARC revealed that the MIT group won the competition. Which means my design is no longer valid for competing in the competition. The three finalists was the MIT group, GA Tech and Embry-Riddle. MIT used a Quadrotor design with the laser range finder, which very much resembled my design. They used an Intel board for stabilization, movement and obstacle avoidance, while the ground station laptop did all the mapping and object identification. The GA Tech group used a CoAxial helicopter design, controlled by an Atmega controller and used the XBee communication system. The Emby-Riddle used a monocopter design that used an Arduino for control.

IARC 5th Mission Completed

IARC revealed that the MIT group won the competition. Which means my design is no longer valid for competing in the competition. The three finalists was the MIT group, GA Tech and Embry-Riddle. MIT used a Quadrotor design with the laser range finder, which very much resembled my design. They used an Intel board for stabilization, movement and obstacle avoidance, while the ground station laptop did all the mapping and object identification. The GA Tech group used a CoAxial helicopter design, controlled by an Atmega controller and used the XBee communication system. The Emby-Riddle used a monocopter design that used an Arduino for control.

They will release the 6th mission on September 1st.

Meeting with Grodzinsky

Met with Grodzinsky today. he gave me some suggestions

1. Look into some real-life applications and what adjustments that need to be made: ex. Nuclear Radiation or Fire suppression
2. How does smoke effect ultra sonic sensors
3. Return policy on electronics
4. More detailed timeline

Back to work

And now I'm back to work. After being on the road for basically two months, I've found it very difficult to get back into any sort of rhythm. I'm slowly getting there though. Unfortunately, I accidently threw out all my notes that I made while I was at my parents house. They survived the entire 11,464 mile trip only to be thrown out when I cleaned my room. :(

Anyways, I've made some more progress on this proposal. Up to 40 pages now. Still feels like I'm missing a lot though. Tomorrow I'll flesh out the conclusion and then it should be fairly presentable. I'll of course continue to work on it.

The webforums have been fairly quiet while I was away. I guess everyone else also went on vacation. However, someone did find a place to get these vibration dampening grommets that look very promising. I'd like to test them in my motor thrust test-bench.

Starting tomorrow, I'll also get back to work on using SolidWorks. I picked up a book back in May, hopefully I'll be able to master it before the semester begins.