Project Andromeda

design and development blog

2009 marked the beginning of active development on the Andromeda project.  Our initial motivation was to create an Autonomous aircraft capable of competing in the Autralian Outback UAV Challenege and so Matt and I set off on a long and costly project that would turn out to be our biggest yet. To make matters more difficult for the team, I was set upon creating an Autopilot to navigate the aircraft as well, rather than choosing from the many off the shelf versions available. By late August, as the competition date was inching closer, it was clear that we were not going to make it in time. However, our activities in 2009 have been a major stepping stone and we hope to be able to leverage this for our entry in the 2010 competition.

The Autopilot was the first thing I started working on. It was by far the more complex electronics project I had worked on with a great deal of components and a relatively complex board layout. Very early on, I decided to use an off the shelf inertial measurement sensor rather that building and programming my own and this proved to be a lifesaver. Hand-in hand with the Autopilot, I was also working on the ground station software and hardware, which at the time consisted of a simple radio interface to my Laptop, and a program written in C# using WPF. The ground station although quirky at times, was sufficient for our needs by visualising the telemetry received from the aircraft and also allowing us to set and modify waypoints from a map.

5 months and many revision later, our unnamed Autopilot performed its first autonomous waypoint navigation on our 2.5 meter electric flying wing test vehicle. This  was fortunate event for us, as during this test were assaulted by an angry cow at the farm which we were flying at. Incapable of manually controlling the plane while attempting to deal with the angry cow, the Autopilot seemed to take over the job without a hitch,

This seemingly timely victory was, unfortunately, followed by many issues as we proceeded to switch from using electric propulsion, to an internal combustion engine. Due to our prior inexperience in small 2-stroke engines the noisy, dirty engine was the source of a great deal of frustration. Even when operating, its vibration would interfere with our inertial sensor, causing all sorts of dampening systems to be tried before a solution was obtained. This was also complicated by our small fuselage working area.

By the end however,  the Autopilot seemed to be at a state where it could perform well in the competition. Unfortunately, due to the accumulation of issues that were still unresolved, we decided not to compete in 2009. In the next part of the 2009 summary, I will shed light on some of these problems and the plans for the 2010 competition.

Tags: 2009, History, UAV

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 1:20 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.