[Canberrauav] Thursday Recap (yes, there's still more!) Stephen Dade stephen_dade at hotmail.com Thu Oct 4 22:10:51 EST 2012 Hi all, Today was spent packing up our equipment and searching for the dropped water bottle. The original plan was also to start the drive back to Canberra, but events overtook us and we will now being the journey back tomorrow morning. We should be back in Canberra by Saturday evening. As for the bottle search: Tridge, Jack, Chris and myself spent the morning theorising about the timeline and process of the bottle being ripped off the UAV. After looking at the telemetry logs, we found 4 specific events related to the incident. Three of these were very sudden decreases in speed and one was when the bottle sensor registered a detachment of the bottle. All of these events were over 4 minute period. This potentially indicated that bottle had "hung around" the UAV for a bit (caught on the tail?) after being detached. Another theory is that the parachute string had loosely fitted around the propeller for a couple of minutes before becoming tight enough to rip the bottle off. By finding the bottle we could ascertain when in the flight it really came away from the UAV. We plotted the UAV's position at the times of these four events and went off looking around those areas for the bottle. Where possible, we got permission of the local landowner first. We also had the help of the Dickson College UAV team (~8 college students and 2 adults) in the search. Chris was the one that found the bottle ~90m downwind from the point when the bottle sensor registered a detachment of the bottle. The location of the bottle was (-26.627069, 151.846367) in lat/long. The bottle was completely intact too (minus the parachute of course). This tells us that the bottle remained attached to the UAV for some time before ripped off. I intend to write up a full report in the next couple of days (attempting) to explain our process and conclusions in regards to this. Also - the UAV Challenge organisers have published their final assessment of CanberraUAV's performance: http://t.co/KczWKA3k In short - we detected Joe to 3m accuracy. This is within the error bounds of GPS. This is an awesome result :) Thanks Stephen
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