I've posted a few little blurbs about the UAV project I'm involved in,
so here's another one.
First a word of explanation.
We have an R/C plane with a camera looking 45 degrees down. The
airplane also has an expensive sensor that spits out location (lon, lat,
elevation) and attitude (pitch, roll, yaw). We have a radio modem
(wireless serial link) to feed the location/attitude data to the ground
in real time. We had a coworker build a photoreal 3d model of our small
flying area. Armed with all that we can use FlightGear to show a live
synthetic view of the UAV. We can configure the flightgear camera view
to closely match the real live video camera view. We have also have a
video transmitter onboard so we can play the live video + the live
synthetic view side by side in real time on the ground. I can't exactly
show you that, but we do have recordings of both streams that my brother
edited together into 'web' movies. My other brother then converted them
to DivX6 for me. DivX6 can by played by many open-source movie players
such as mplayer or xine. Or there is a free windows media player plugin
available here: http://www.free-codecs.com/download/DivX6.htm
The two movies are 50Mb each so they are kind of large. The first movie
shows the two views side by side. The second movie has the real view
overlayed on top of the synthetic view, blended together. The second
movie is my favorite of the two.
One more bit of explanation. The accuracy of the synthetic view is
obviously very dependent on the accuracy of our location/attitude
sensor. The yaw estimate of our sensor at the beginning of the movie is
many degrees off, but after a minute or two, it locks on pretty
closely. (Note that it eventually gives accurate aircraft heading
independent of wind or ground track.) Also you can see places where our
ground based antenna aimer got lazy and the video fuzzes out, but in
those cases you still have the synthetic view to fly from.
So here are the video links:
http://www.flightgear.org/~curt/Models/Special/Rascal110_2/Movies/chapt1-divx6.avi
http://www.flightgear.org/~curt/Models/Special/Rascal110_2/Movies/chapt3-divx6.avi
They are about 8-9 minutes each. Oh and for all the info I have
available on this project, you can visit my 'unofficial' project page here:
http://www.flightgear.org/~curt/Models/Special/Rascal110_2/
Finally, Lee is building a FlightGear version of this same aircraft so
hopefully before too long it will be flyable in FlightGear (using one of
FG's built in flight dynamics engines.) We have a programmable
autopilot purchased for this airplane (but not yet installed/running.)
We are hoping to port FlightGear's PID algorithm to our flight computer
and hopefully then we can use FG to tune our PID loops (and if we don't
immediately crash we will definitely be bragging about it.) :-)
Regards,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson http://www.flightgear.org/~curt
HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org
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