CanberraUAV Design

CanberraUAV

Design

Airframe

Cyber Technology [ http://www.cybertechuav.com.au/ ] Cyberhawk. This aircraft is a rugged UAV, designed for imaging and search type missions. It has a Desert Aircraft 50cc single cylinder engine driving a "pusher" propellor and an alternator providing plenty of on-board power.

The advantage of a "pusher" propellor is the exhaust from the engine is behind the main body and thus will not obscure the vision of a camera mounted in that section.

Autopilot

Our major autopilot software is the Ardupilot [ http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/ardupilot-main-page ], an open source UAV controller. The advantages of this system is twofold: First, we can modify the source code to fit our requirements. Secondly, it has been well tested by many hobbyists around the world and on a variety of platforms, giving it a great deal of ruggedness and reliability

Cameras

Point Grey [ http://www.ptgrey.com/ ] Chameleon. This is a small form factor 1.3 megapixel greyscale camera. It is designed for machine vision applications, having a high shutter speed, optical stablisation and a high sensitivity CCD.

Image Processing

Pandaboard [ http://www.pandaboard.org/ ]. This is an ARM platform boasting a Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor, 1 Gb RAM and onboard USB, Wifi and Ethernet. This runs a basic Linux distribution on an attached SSD and performs all image capture and processing.

Ground Control

MAVProxy [ http://git.samba.org/?p=tridge/UAV/MAVProxy.git;a=summary ] is our main ground control station, along with qGroundControl [ http://qgroundcontrol.org/ ] for monitoring all aspects of the UAV's progress and system status. They are open source and multi-platform, enabling us to customise the applications to our needs quickly and easily.

Simulation and Testing

We are using a HIL (Hardware in Loop) simulation setup using FlightGear [ http://www.flightgear.org/ ], qgroundcontrol and MAVLink [ https://github.com/pixhawk/mavlink ] to test the Ardupilot before putting it in the air

We have several small "crash resistant" test aircraft in our hangar for field testing. This includes a Skywalker [ http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/strong-epo-foam-skywalker-uav ]. These are used for all up testing of combined systems.