Autonomous Ground Controlled Helicopter

Pplace

Hello all,

I've been scouting around this website for awhile now, this is my first post. I'm working on a project that I was hoping the collective expertise of this forum would be able to assist with.

A little background:

I'm a senior Aerospace Engineering student at a school in Massachusetts. Our senior year project consist of purchasing a remote controlled helicopter, redesigning the blades, servo and structural weight in order to carry a maximum payload off of batteries, expectedly lithium polymer batteries.

This redesigned helicopter will be controlled autonomously by a ground vehicle, a reworked roomba in this case. This ground vehicle is simply a proof of concept which could be modified for anything from the irobot packbot, to fire trucks, to citywide wiMAX connections, to mars rovers.

Project Sponsored by:
NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center

Facilities Available:

High Powered Wind Tunnels
Controls Laboratory
Machining Lab/Robotics Laboratory

Budget:
About $2000

Length of Project:
~ 6 months


I'm hoping to keep this thread updated with our progress as we progress on this project. I'll be posting questions I have about the use of sensors and programming. All/any help I can get will be very useful.

Thanks,

Ryan

Aaqil Khan

Hi Pplace.

Just curious - what do you mean by "autonomous·ground control". If its controlled manually then its not autonomous and vice versa. Unless you meant autonomous as well as ground controlled.

Anyways, looks like you've got all the facilities to make a great project. All the best [noparse]:)[/noparse]

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E=mc^2

Pplace

By autonomous ground control I mean that there will be a ground vehicle, the roomba in this case, that will have control over the helicopter itself. The roomba will be retrofitted with vision detection systems and mapping programs. The roomba will react to obstacles and command the helicopter according to what it sees. The roomba itself will be controlled via human remote control, but unless overwritten the only thing flying the helicopter will be the ground vehicle..

Professorwiz

What heli are you going to use?· I've got over $2000 wrapped up in mine without any extra controls.· Just a thought, if your using a blade cp or something it might be doable, but they might not even lift the extra weight of another circuit board.

Pplace

We will be making a final decision on which heli to use by the beginning of next week. However, right now we are leaning towards:

T-Rex 450XL (HDE) 3D Hiller Micro Helicopter kit

We do have access to "MEMS" technology such as for the gyroscope which will shave grams off the weight. I'm not sure what a blade 'cp' is, however we will be redesigning the blades from scratch in order to maximize lift.

Professorwiz

You might want to do some research into carbon fiber blades that are already offered for the aerial photography guys.· There's alot of research over the years that have been proven out for a good set of blades.· For Heli products and research I suggest you start here - http://www.runryder.com/

For Blade research the best on the market is Vblades here - http://www.vblades.com/

I think the Trex would be a good platform, you'd be suprised how quick a good set of servo's and misc parts will run.

Have fun!

Russ