Unmanned Systems Today

Open ROV VR Cockpit             In 201X the OpenROV company released their idea on Kickstarter for a DIY underwater drone to explore the ocean.  In an Interview with the company’s co-founder David Lang he stated “five years ago the team just wanted to explore underwater caves in search of gold, but in the time since then, they’ve shipped 1,600 underwater robot kits to 50 different countries, prototyped and experimented with numerous new designs, and built a community of similarly minded underwater enthusiasts online” (Love, 2015). Their campaign was a huge success and the evolution of the design began to grow in sophistication both in terms of performance, and available data. What makes the platform special is the fact that it is open source, which means its software and development is wholly supported by its community of users. One recent addition to the Open ROV platform is the OpenROV VR Cockpit which displays valuable data to the operator directly to a virtual display on the u

Unmanned systems required a method of transmitting data back and forth from the aircraft to the ground station. While there are multiple methods and protocols used to accomplish this transmission, one of the best examples is MAVLINK. MAVLINK stands for Micro Air Vehicle Link, and is the primary method of transmitting data on of the shelf consumer drones like the Parrot AR drone, as well as many of the do it yourself kits and collegiate robotics programs utilizing the PIXHAWK or Ardupilot flight controllers. The following will describe a commonly purchased DIY autopilot kit, the Arducopter, attached to an F450 style quadcopter frame.               Mavlink was designed in 2009 by Lorenz Myer under LGPL License (Balasubramanian, 2013). Mavlink works by sending encoded messages. These messages are first encoded by the ground control software often called Mission Planner (MP). The encoded messages are sent either via USB serial connection, or through wireless telemetry, both can be used,

Research Assignment: UAS Sensor Placement Preface, This topic is of particular interest to me as I own both of the UAS being discussed in this assignment/blog posting. The DJI Mavic Air, and the Armattan Rooster FPV racing/freestyle Quadcopter. First Person View Drone Racings is gaining rapid popularity thanks to the Drone Racing League being featured on ESPN, local racing events held by Multi GP, and freestyle flying as seen on the popular youtube channel Rotor Riot. The high speed quadcopters are built to be fast and durable typically touting carbon fiber frames, high thrust motors, and advanced flight controllers. The Armattan Rooster is a Racing/Freestyle frame that can be customized by the builder or purchased as a complete drone. My personal Rooster was built using a CLracingF4s Flight controller, and a 4 in 1 Spedix 30 am ESC, 4x TMotor F40 Pro v2s, a TBS unify pro video transmitter, and a TBS crossfire long range low latency receiver. The onboard FPV camera is a Runcam