[Canberrauav] Weekend Adventures
Stephen Dade stephen_dade at hotmail.com 
Sun Jun 9 12:30:28 UTC 2013 

Hi everyone,

Summary version:

We went to Mt Kosciusko and flew the Bixler UAV on a real S&R mission. It
never came back and is assumed crashed somewhere. The terrain was too rough
to go looking for it.

Full version:

The family/friends of a missing bushwalker
(http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/50k-reward-for-bushwalker-dead-or-
alive-20130607-2ntnp.html) contacted Coptercam
(http://www.coptercam.com.au/) last Friday, in regards to performing some
UAV S&R of the area around Mt Kosciusko where the missing bushwalker was
last found.

Coptercam in turn contacted CanberraUAV (via Tridge) wanting some local
assistance and technical expertise with running S&R missions.

We met with them on Saturday night to plan out the mission and waypoints. We
agreed to all go down together and we decided to bring along the Bixler
(which Tridge and Jack spent most of Saturday building up) for additional
S&R capacity. It was fitted with the GoPro3 for imaging.

On Sunday morning we (Tridge, Jack, Alex and myself) drove down to Mt
Kosciusko and met the family/friends of the missing buskwalker and worked
out the best places to search with our UAV's. We also met with two park
rangers, who provided assistance in getting us and our equipment out to the
remote location (Seamans Hut, 2km from the Mt Kosciusko summit).

The search area was several km from here. We spent some time looking at
terrain tracking, Bixler climb rates, wind speed and battery capacity in an
attempt to make the mission possible. Even with a small search area, we were
operating at the limits of the Bixler's range.

Also of note was the very steep ravines and mountains, making terrain
tracking difficult. Some of the mountains rise higher than the Bixler's
maximum climb rate. Tridge wrote a script to modify the waypoints altitudes
to take this into account.

In addition there was a major ridge between us and the search area. Thus
radio comms would be severed for a section of the flight.

The Bixler was sent up first. Due to strong winds, the first flight was
aborted after a few minutes.

We tried again an hour later. Takeoff and cruise to the search area was OK.
We did notice quite a bit of turbulence in the air which the Bixler was
mostly coping with.

After the expected radio comms blackout the Bixler never came back.

It is likely the extra turbulence drained the flight battery too fast and it
ran out mid-flight. The higher altitude of the Mt Kosciusko region would
have degraded the performance of the Bixler too.

Later in the day Coptercam tried a simple mission with their eBee
(http://www.sensefly.com/drones/ebee.html) UAV. They did not attempt terrain
tracking and flew quite high. The UAV came back successfully. They intend to
do further flights on Monday, once Tridge has assisted them with creating
terrain-tracking missions.

Although we lost an airframe, we learnt a lot about CanberraUAV's ability to
perform S&R missions, both from a technical and organisational perspective.
I'll send out the specifics in separate email.

Thanks

Stephen

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