Hey,
I'm starting off with a UAV project based on a airplane which I intend to use for the prophanging maneuver.
Prop-hanging the Showtime 4D For those who aren't aware..
Since I really don't have much time to prototype and experiment, I'm looking at sparkfun for the components like the IMU (
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9184), Servo Controller (
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8897),
The idea is to integrate the board with my plane, which is going to be controlled using a futaba 6 channel and basing a wireless camera on it, which'll be controlled directly by the futaba. The driving signals from the futaba shall be fed to a custom made atmega 128 board running at 16 MHz, which will accept the futaba values and the error values from the various sensors on the IMU and give an appropriate output to the servo motor controller.
I intend to use the XBee to calibrate my sensors on the PC itself and possibly log flight data on the go, although the 1 mW Xbee gives a maximum range of only a 100 metres outdoors, its a good enough platform to experiment with methinks.
However this sounds great in theory, I'm very certain there are some flaws in practice, any ideas/inputs on the products I'm buying etc? And further, on how to implement this in the best way?
1. Signal Mixing - The idea so far is to figure this part as we go along. We've worked with gyros alone in making a human interface device, but not with accelerometers. Obviously with a low speed processing as on the mega 168, we wont be doing any kalman filtering (or for that matter even if we did have an ARM, it'd take us a very long time to do that Smile ) , but the idea is to implement something basic, any ideas here are welcome.
2. We've made RC controlled gliders etc before, but obviously a UAV is a completely different ball game. Inputs on construction are appreciated. Currently we've built our own airplane because the commercially available ones did not meet our design expectation. The plane is made partly out of balsa and partly of carbon fibre rods.
Thanks a lot
