[Canberrauav] Monday Recap (UAV Challenge, day 1)
Stephen Dade stephen_dade at hotmail.com 
Mon Oct 1 22:00:05 EST 2012 

Hi everyone

(thought I'd include the MHV readership in this too)

Today was the first day of the Outback UAV Challenge, with 5 teams making
 it this far:
Forward Robotics (Canada) - Had many technical problems with their UAV and
 will go through scrutineering on Tuesday.
Muroc Wild Hogs (Brisbane) - First team to do their scrutineering flight. 
Unfortunately, 1 minute into flight, their UAV crossed the Geofence during
flight and terminated (dived into ground) at the airport.
CompassUAV (Brisbane) - Had many technical problems with their UAV and 
will go through scrutineering on Tuesday. Tridge has been giving them alot 
of help, since they are using the same autopilot and radio modules as us.
OpenUAS (Netherlands) - Third team to do their scrutineering flight. 
Shortly after takeoff, they (think they) experienced interference on their 
40 MHz RC radio link. Their UAV thus got confused and dived into the ground.
TGIF (HSBNE, Brisbane) - Their UAV crashed on Sunday during their final 
test. They were not able to repair the damage in time for the competition.

As for our scrutineering:
We had a scare early on in the static scrutineeing when our tail elevons 
did not respond to (any) commands. After 20 minutes of frantic debugging, 
we discovered that our elevon mixer (turns elevator+rudder commands into 
elevon commands) had died. We replaced the component with it's backup and 
passed static scrutineering. We still don't know why this happened...

Our flight test felt *very* scary (more so for our pilot, Jack) due to the 
moderate crosswinds at the time. We had some trouble setting up our ground 
station by the side of the runway in the 15 minutes allocated - there was 
some confusion over who was supposed to be doing what (now fixed). We then 
had to wait 20 minutes for a RFDS aircraft to takeoff. Throughout the day 
full sized aircraft were using the airport, so there were stoppages here 
and there.

We did a manual takeoff from the main runway and did a few circuits over 
the airport. Jack simulated a dead stick touch-and-go on the grass runway. 
We then switched to manual mode and tracked to 4 waypoints above the 
airport. The judges asked us to simulate a loss-of-datalink situation so 
Tridge switched off the heatbeat signal to the UAV, which though it has 
lost comms with the ground station. It then loitered above the centre of 
the airport until we re-enabled the heatbeat signal (as expected).

Jack then landed the UAV on the grass runway. The landing was very gentle 
and the UAV did not suffer any damage.

Our camera was running during this flight and we captured many images (and 
detected) the judges (and us) on the ground :)

We were 2nd to do our scrutineering flight after Muroc. The teams after us 
had many technical problems and could not fly (except OpenUAS). By 3pm the 
weather had deteriorated and the competition was called off for the day. 
The remaining two teams will do their scrutineering flights tomorrow.

Due to this, our main mission will be most likely be in the late morning 
or around lunchtime tomorrow.

We've spent tonight refining our checklists and procedures, so everyone is 
aware of what they should be doing at each point during the setup and 
mission. We've also fixed a few minor technical issues.

Thanks

-Stephen

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