Sig Rascal 110 aka. Icarus had its second flight and the first one with an on-board camera, though it was just a cellphone taped at its bottom but the video gives a nice idea about the stability and degree of vibrations of the aircraft. The aircraft was flying over the college's campus at about a height of 80-100 ft.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_o8M8SRYGo
Monday, May 18, 2009
Saturday, May 2, 2009
AHRS Update
Yes, I know we've been missing for a while but we're back and we promise we haven't been idle.
The Attitude Heading and Reference System(AHRS) is two-thirds ready.
We have successfully implemented a 6-state Extended Kalman filter(EKF) to compute the roll, pitch and yaw.The roll and pitch are working astonishingly well, while the yaw is completely screwed up!!
To test our AHRS, we did an experiment in which it was tested along with a commercial AHRS - Xsens Mti IMU .The two units were aligned along the same axes on a bakelite board and different motions were given.The data was logged and then plotted in Matlab.
The results for roll and pitch were nothing short of spectacular.
As can be seen from the graphs,performance of our AHRS almost exactly matches the MTI
leaving aside the initial offsets(due to errors while assembling on the board).This is a huge step forward as with just the roll and pitch, the control system will be able to fly the plane with stability.
However, the yaw is still a matter of concern but we hope to work it out in the next few days.Hopefully, our next post will be our last for the AHRS team.
A big Thank You !! to the AUV team (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) who lent us their IMU for testing.
Maiden Flight of ICARUS !!!
Yes, the damn plane can actually fly !!!
The first flight of Icarus ( named after Daedalus' son of the melting wax fame) thankfully did not live up to it's name and was a resounding success.
The MECH team, often accused (behind their backs...so please NO ONE tell them!!) of delaying work and wasting too much time in frivolous stuff, have done some fantastic work over the past 3 days to get the plane ready to fly.
It was an amazing sight to watch...the plane is really stable and flies well, so thats good news for the control team.
Somehow today watching it fly I couldnt help but feel that we are a lot closer to our goal..and with a little more effort we can definitely make it in time for the competition. But anyway, that's still a long way off.
A video of the flight will be posted pretty soon.
Suraj
The first flight of Icarus ( named after Daedalus' son of the melting wax fame) thankfully did not live up to it's name and was a resounding success.
The MECH team, often accused (behind their backs...so please NO ONE tell them!!) of delaying work and wasting too much time in frivolous stuff, have done some fantastic work over the past 3 days to get the plane ready to fly.
It was an amazing sight to watch...the plane is really stable and flies well, so thats good news for the control team.
Somehow today watching it fly I couldnt help but feel that we are a lot closer to our goal..and with a little more effort we can definitely make it in time for the competition. But anyway, that's still a long way off.
A video of the flight will be posted pretty soon.
Suraj
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