All posts by paparazzi

2nd and 3rd places on MAV 06

Launch-20282Two Paparazzi teams, ENAC/Miraterre and Martin Mueller/Christian Lindeberg won 2nd and 3rd place at the MAV06 competition in Sandestin, Florida. Unfortunately, both teams had insufficient video resolution to identify the 1.5m ground target
required for high-scoring and the winning prize went to Bringham Young University who was able to identify 2 of the 3 targets with a Panasonic KX-141 camera and an unusually narrow 30 degree FOV lens. The Bringham Young team used the Procerus Kestrel autopilot (originally developed at the university) and obviously practiced video target recognition much more than the rest of us.

Flight performance and navigation for both Dragon Slayers and the Black One was exceptional as usual. All planes performed flawless autonomous takeoffs and landings and the Slayer performed an
autonomous paintball drop with wind-corrected precision that put the ball within 3 meters of the designated target from an altitude of 40 meters in a 5 m/s wind. As luck would have it, the stress of
managing two aircraft from a single ground station during an intense competition, aggravated by a misbehaving GPS in one of the planes that required a power and flight-plan reset just prior to launch
resulted in us neglecting to re-input the target coordinates and the ball was dropped accurately on the default target location, not the actual target location provided by the judges just prior to flight.

-Five Paparazzi teams were in the six first places.

 

See the complete MAV06 Photo Gallery

See you next year in Toulouse, France for MAV07.

mav 198

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JMD 04 Results

Paparazzi was very successful at the JMD04 (Journées Micro Drones) competition/conference in Toulouse, France. The ENAC team won first place with the Microjet. Here is the report from
Antoine Drouin.

Hi everybody

Paparazzi's microjet won the JMD04 MAV event 
( http://www.micro-uav04.net/ )

During the event, we had contact with industrials who told us they were interested in manufacturing our board. Maybe the end of the nightmare for those of you who don't enjoy the soldering iron :)

We've received PCBs and assembled the new version of the controller board (v1.2.1) - The servo driver reset bug is fixed and the board seems to behave well on the desk - We'll let you  know how it does in flight in the following days.

We've tagged the version that we used for the trophy (jmd-04 ). You should be able to safely upgrade from the previous tagged version (emav-04). Most noticable difference is the use of UTM in place of GWS84. You'll have to setup your GPS receiver to output the correct messages. Maybe we could add our receiver configuration in the CVS ?

You will also need a patched version of ivy (the network software bus) while the guy at openatc.org make a new release with the patches we sent them.

We're setting up a debian package repository and let you know when it's done.

We intend to break everything in the CVS head in the following days to add ground station support for several aircraft at once, so you'd better stick to the jmd-04 version for now.

During the flight competition, we once again had trouble with radio jamming. We really need a checksumed rf transmission. I will call Multiplex once more to ask for their PCM specifications. If they refuse once again to disclose it, I want to define and implement a new "open" PCM protocol, eventually with low throughput data in it. We could use a commercial HF module (maybe even a
frequency synthesys once) and connect it to the laptop. Then fly using a joystick or a simulator transmitter.

Do you have an idea about a suitable protocol or know the interface of a commercial HF module ?

A+

Antoine
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First Place at Ensica/Supaéro “journées microdrone”

ENAC’s Paparazzi team placed first in the Ensica/Supaéro “journées micro drone” in France. Here is the report from Antoine Drouin.

Hi folks..

Paparazzi has won first prize in the Ensica/Supaéro "journées microdrone" (http://www.ensica.fr/microdrone).

It successfully completed the autonomous flight and was able to locate the target :)

More details on the webpage asap.


Regards,

Antoine
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