Worthington Sharpe website

Thursday 11 September 2014

The Wing for UAV Control

Things all got a bit more real on Monday when I took a trip down to Norwich to meet Elliot Corke of Hexcam. Hexcam operate UAVs (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles, often called drones) for aerial photography and video work. I wanted to speak to them about using the Wing to operate the aircraft.



Some of our earlier engineering projects around a decade ago were on UAVs and the industry has moved on massively over the last few years. It is being approached from two sides: the hobby side of things, where there is still a lot of interest in piloting; and the industry side, where there is simply a job to be done and a UAV is the most practical solution for example in aerial mapping or search and rescue.

The level of autonomy has now reached a stage where it is extremely impressive. Take for example these flying robot rockstars. In many situations you can programme an aircraft to take off, complete its mission, then return and land, all by itself.

Our plan was to use the precision pointing of the mouse for the plotting and adjusting of the way points, and the 3D functions for manual aircraft control as required, or for camera gimbal control.

We already had the Wing working with the DJI and Ardupilot ground control software but we had only got as far as getting the sliders to move about in the calibration stage.

I had only really expected to open up discussions about the possibilities with Hexcam and have a look at how they operate but we managed a bit more than that; we plugged the Wing into the Hexcam laptop, calibrated it, and headed to their flight test site to see what would happen.

The Wing with Hexcam UAVs
The Wing with Hexcam UAVs


We had already used the Wing with the Heli X5 simulation software and so had some idea of how it would behave. Nonethless, we were delighted by how well the Wing performed in the field. With the standard twin-stick transmitter as a back-up Elliot took hold of the Wing and started flying. The throttle was mapped to the z-axis, which wasn't ideal but nevertheless, Elliot was soon more than comfortable with the Wing and was manoeuvring the aircraft adeptly. Elliot pilots UAVs for a living so he's certainly a lot more skilled than most for this sort of challenge, but he even let me have a go.

Elliot using the Wing to fly a quad copter
 Throttle control would be better handled via the scroll wheel, rather than the z-axis but we didn't manage to sort this out prior to the test. Thinking ahead to increased autonomy, using the scroll wheel to dial in a height is likely to be an intuitive means of controlling the altitude of the aircraft directly.

UAV control was one of the main drivers right from the start of the Wing project so this was a big milestone. We're now speaking to a few people to try and get a demo rig put together. We want to be able to use the Wing to simply point and click on the map in order to direct the aircraft, while manipulating the 3D capabilities of pitch, roll and yaw to control the camera. Exciting times lie ahead.

The day seemed surprisingly clear of technical problems until the way back. The train driver announced there would be a delay as one of the train doors wouldn't close. A short while later there came another announcement 'Don't be alarmed at the lights going out, we're going to try re-starting the train.'

Wednesday 20 August 2014

Trial Batch

The manufacture of the first batch of products is now well under way. Here are some photos from the machine shop.



Wing shell and base parts part-machined


The upper part of the shell part-machined
We should be getting the parts back over the next couple of weeks and then we can start to start assembling them ready for field trials.

Monday 4 August 2014

Winging it - Exhibiting the Wing for the very first time


I'm very happy to share some great news; the Wing's been on its first ever Public Outing, and it went really well.

Those worries I had of Murphy's law doing it's worst were unfounded and the second attempt at ordering the right thickness of electronic circuit board was successful. It was a good job really as we had booked to exhibit at a UK Interactive Entertainment (Ukie) event that was held in Liverpool last month and only got it all put together late on the Sunday night before the event.

Exhibitions can be a good way to introduce a product to people and are often used as a launch-platform for a new product. We are only now starting to prepare the product for field trials so we couldn't really call it a product launch. 

So, we rocked-up complete with a banner beautifully printed by Birmingham based Alhambra Print, a set of flyers, and a laptop running Arma 2.

We didn't know quite what to expect, but the reception we got was far beyond whatever we did expect. We got brilliant feedback from people from many different fields, not just gaming (as you might expect from a gaming expo), but from music production, finance to, err, virtual environment designers for penguin sanctuaries... the one thing in common being that people liked the Wing. Which was nice.

Here are some photos from the event.




Sam at the exhibition
Sam on the way home narrowly escaping
an attack from one of the Liver Birds


We're now trying to decide whether or not to go to another exhibition in October to introduce the product to some of the other industries. The main contender is the Engineering Design Show. There is a lot of scope for potential customers but it's a big unknown whether we'd get real value. And at the wrong side of £3k, we would need a lot of value.

Friday 13 June 2014

Pre-Production Prototype

After working on something for so long it can become a little bit difficult to let it go. My main purpose for a long time now has been getting the engineering design finished. Sure, there was a lot of other things to do, but it was all about the product.

We (well, it was me really) made a mistake with the electronics and ordered the prototype PCBs twice as thick as they should have been so we've lost about a month while we get a new set made. Nevertheless, when we put all the mechanical components together, it all works just as it should. Maybe there are a few things that could be tweaked a little, but that is it really; the design is finished.

Pre-production prototype. Other colours available.

Statements like that do of course tempt Murphy's law to do it's worst. The electronics worked on the previous prototype so should be fine now but we're still preparing for some unanticipated disaster.

The immediate difficulty for me though is not opening up the design software and looking for something that needs changing.

Monday 26 May 2014

Blue

After the extensive research we decided to go with a blue finish for the prototype. Thank you to everyone who gave feedback. We will however still get the trial batch made in a few different colours as the vote was hardly unanimous.

You can see from the image below that the shade is a bit different to the blue sample disk but is still a lovely colour. The actual colour that results from a particular dye depends on the grade of aluminium and the amount of time the part is left in the coating bath. Once we are happy with a colour we can get consistent results but a bit of experimentation will be required to start with.



I'll post more images from the completed prototype and also the other colours as I get them.

Friday 2 May 2014

More on Colours

We did some renderings in different colours to try and get a better idea other than just the coloured samples. These were done in-house so are less than perfect representations.

The white is also a bit of an unknown. It is apparently not normally possible to anodise in white, so we will have to see if the Diamondyze process that we are using gives this as an option.

The "silver" samples we've got are really more of a grey colour so we need to see if it can be brightened up a bit.

Colour Options

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Friday 25 April 2014

Colour Options

We've been spending a lot of time sorting out the finish for the machined aluminium parts.

We got the first of the aluminium prototypes polished, and while the finish was initially really good, it scratched too easily. We thought brushing the aluminium would help, but there was the same problem.

Anodising was a possibility and give some nice colour options, like on a drinks bottle or climbing carabiner. Once again however, it is not really robust enough. Hard anodising is tougher but you loose the colour options. - It just tends to be a drab grey / brown or black.

Then we found about a process called Diamondyze, offered in the UK by Camcoat's Poyton facility. There are some more details of the process in this Techline brouchure.

Here is a photograph of some samples Camcoat sent us.




Now all we have to do is decide on the colour.

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