2012 WWW Fuller Symposium, Washington DC

Dr. Lian Pin Koh from ETH Zürich speaks about the application of drones (small, autonomous Aircrafts) for biologic conservation:


A ResearchDrone's MAJA is featured at 16:31.

/dev/null

i just figured where all the stuff that is piped to /dev/null goes to.

APM Camara control print

The first prototype, lets put this into a drone.

APM Camera power control & CHDK intervalometer

Finally I made some progress on the r/c camera control. A fairly simple and cheap solution is to solder cables to the power button of a cannon camera. Hook these up to an ATtiny85 (45 would probably do as well). The ATtiny reads a PPM signal from an r/c receiver and switches the camera on or off accordingly.

ATtiny  pin layout:


Schema:


Demo:





ATTiny Code (C++ Arduino):

/**
 * Read PPM signal
 * 
 * Decode r/c receiver PPM servo signal and turn lights on 
 * according to stick position.
 *
 * $Id$
 */

// pin setup
#define PIN_PPM  0
#define PIN_POS1 4

unsigned long duration, lastgood = 0;
int position = 0;

void setup() {
  pinMode(PIN_PPM, INPUT);
  pinMode(PIN_POS1, OUTPUT);
  digitalWrite(PIN_POS1, LOW);
}

void loop() {
  // the length of the pulse (in microseconds) or 0 if no pulse 
  // started before the timeout (unsigned long)
  duration = pulseIn(PIN_PPM, HIGH, 20000); 
  if (duration == 0)
    duration = lastgood;
  else
    lastgood = duration;
  
  position = map(lastgood, 1000, 2000, 0, 1);
  
  if (position > 0)
    digitalWrite(PIN_POS1, HIGH);
  else
    digitalWrite(PIN_POS1, LOW);
}

Intervalometer Code (lua):

--[[
rem 2013-01-13 by Simon Wunderlin, ResearchDrones LLC
@title ResearchDrones Fast Interval
@param a = interval (sec/10)
@default a 10
--]]

function camera_close()
 click "display"
 sleep(1000)
 click "display"
 sleep(1000)
 shut_down()
 sleep(5000)
end

--[[
f = get_usb_power(1)
if f == 1 then camera_close() end 
]]--
--shoot()

repeat
 start = get_tick_count()
 
 press("shoot_half")
 repeat
  sleep(50)
  until get_shooting() == true
 click("shoot_full")
 release("shoot_half")
 
 sleep(a*100 - (get_tick_count() - start))
until ( false )

ResearchDrones Deployments

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ResearchDrones in Congo

In December 2012 Remo and I were invited to do a technology demonstration in the National Park Odzala, in the Republic of Congo (not DRC).

It was an interesting field trip, the first time for us being out there with researchers.

Out of this 9 day trip, only 2 days could be spent on flying, testing and training. The rest of the time we spent on airplanes, hotels and most of it in a Jeep driving roughly 1600km from the airport to the national park on more or less something we would call roads.


View Odzala National Park, Congo in a larger map

The 3 nights in the field we spent in a camp of the Forrestry Administration in Mbomo (1.5h away from our flying site).

Here a short video of the test flights we were conducting in the Savannah in the middle of the national park.

ResearchDrones test flights with thermal imaging cameras

On the 3rd January we have been conducting test flights with 2 different thermal imaging cameras in Switzerland.

We have been using an FLIR (forward looking) and a NEC F30 (downward looking) on the current UAV platform connected to a long range video transmission system.

The FLIR HS-324 produced quiet good results




At 0:30 and 1:38 there can people and cars be seen standing on the runway. This footage was taken from around 100m above the ground.

Some cars and people standing on the runway can be seen at 0:50, 1:12 and 1:30.