Simulated Wind Effects on Lightweight UAV - 2008
Project Objectives:
- Simulate Aircraft Flight Characteristics
- Simulate Wind
- Simulate GPS location drift and introduced error
- Develop appropriate navigation functions to compensate for errors and deviations in the flight path
- Test scenarios that would be difficult to monitor in a real world test
- Develop new functionality without risking the aircraft
The moving white circle is the aircraft and the red circle is the target area. Target areas are currently picked at random. The dots left behind the aircraft is the history trail, each dot is about 5 seconds. Wind effects the turning and the velocity of the aircraft causing deviations in the flight path. The navigation system in the onboard computer attempts to compensate for the introduced error.
User Navigation:
- Click and drag mouse on applet to change viewing angle
UAV PROJECT 
Started in the summer of 2007 the UAV project has evolved into a working project capable of flying a small model plane with little or no human input during flight. The projected started with an AVR Butterfly demo board. Parts where soldered on and the thing barely ran. But it gave me a way to start playing with electronics. Since then I've been constantly working to make more advances. When I worked out the original navigation software it was with a pda strapped inside of a RC Car with gps and servo controllers.
The car was capable of running about a mile and a half course in grass soccor fields. The only drawback was the charging time and the fact that I couldn't hit any bumps.
When I started the plane stage of the project I had a lot of trouble flying during the day with thermals and wind so I was forced to set the plane up for night flying. This gave me a huge advantage with weather. There was little or no wind, it was cooler, and I could see the plane at any place in the sky with no problems.
Tests with the plane have been fairly successful. The longest flight has been about 15 minutes and the highest altitude was over 1500 feet. To see the plane at that altitude I needed binoculars. I've taken some photos of NMT at night using this plane.
