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So good morning, and
it's nice to see so many people at this
early hour, so
welcome everyone.
I'm incredibly happy to be speaking
with you.
My name is President Muskie and I have
been developing drones for quite a while
now.
I'm one of the paparazzi UAV system
developers.
I actively contributes software and
hardware designs to the project, help
maintain the websites and the
server infrastructure.
So I might be a little bit biased,
but I will try to be as objective
as I can.
My company, one bit square performs open
source micro UAV, consulting, development
and manufacturing, I have been working
in that field of autonomous
unmanned aerial vehicles for
almost seven years now, and I'm also
the developer of Lisa and Lisa s
Autopilot's that are part
of the paparazzi platform.
When we read about drones in the news,
we perceive them as big, scary,
expensive and very likely lethal.
But this is not what we would be talking
about today.
We will be talking about this small,
the affordable,
the sometimes odd and
sometimes also quite big.
I am also only interested in drones
that adhere to the same idea of freedom
as freedom of speech.
And some of
those that everyone could build
if they had a minute to spare, I know
this is quite a problem for many of us.
Also, I think a drone needs to be
able to fly by itself
as most at the most simple
level. The only thing that one has to
tell the aircraft is where
to go and what route it should
take to get there.
And this flight instructions can be
greatly more sophisticated than that
now that we have set up some borders for
the things that we will be talking about.
Let's start with some history.
I am pretty sure there are projects that
are older than what I could find,
but this is as far back
as I could uncover.
The project is simply called autopilot
or it has some DIY thing
in it too, and
can still be found on SourceForge.
The project was created in 2001,
and it's still being worked on.
That's the funny part.
The Autopilot has an open
source stabilization and navigation
system for helicopters, and
they documented their first fully
hands off of the remote
control flights in June 2003.
The next project was the development
of paparazzi UAV.
I know what you might think paparazzi
is a strange name.
But I just attribute it to the French
humor.
Around the time when the previously
mentioned Autopilot project was
performing their first autonomous
flights, Pascal Bresee and Antoine
DuPont from Inuk Local
Nazionale de la Vision Seville
in Toulouse in France decided
to compete in the NCAA Super
IRA autonomous flight competition.
The original design used an off
the shelf commercial FM
copilots stabilization system,
which was mounted on their twinjet
remote controlled airplane.
They were feeding control signals
to it from a laptop on the ground
that, in turn, was running the actual
control instead of a human pilot.
This can be rather unreliable set
up.
It is difficult to predict
what the black box commercial
hardware and software will do
and how it will react to the computer
generated commands.
This resulted in unavoidable oscillations
and end crashes.
Antoine and Pascal developed a board
very similar to the one it created
for the Autopilot project
and reusing some of their remote
control parsing codes and
algorithms, and also adding
good deal of their own code.
They were able to win the competition,
what with that system?
This inspired them to continue working
on that project and because they wished
to share and their ideas
and collaborate with other enthusiasts,
they released the software and hardware
designs to the public or under GPL.
In the years that followed, more teams
used paparazzi system to compete in
competitions and win a lot of prizes
involving fixed wing aircraft and
autonomous flight.
Around the same time, when paparazzi was
started to smart, German
high school students developed a rarely
before seen flying object for
and.
You can forecast, is a national science
compared to competition for high school
students, which recognizes
and rewards inventions and innovations.
You might recognize the device they
invented since it's quite ubiquitous
by now. Definitely here.
Based on their invention, the company
Silver Lit started producing
a Quadro copter toy called X UFO.
I'm departing here from the open source
premise, but stay with me because
the innovation is an important one.
As you might know, a Quadro copter is
inherently unstable.
That means it will fall out of the sky
just like that if you don't feed
signals to the motors.
The rule of thumb is that
it needs at least 100
hertz getting updates
to the motors so that it
stays afloat. A human is only
able to deliver at most 10 updates
per second.
If they are really well trained,
thus the platform needs some kind of
a mechanical or electronic stabilization
system to make it playable by a human.
The X UFO was price
optimized as a toy.
It used a mechanical gyroscope
with whole sensor pickups.
This is quite a mind blowing, considering
it was cheaper to build and manufacture
such a device than it was to purchase
an off the shelf piezoelectric
or micro mechanical sensor.
The mechanical gyroscope had many
issues.
It suffered from progression
and as well as limited error
angle before it started hitting the
brackets, resulting in the
so-called flip of death.
These shortcomings and the fact
that the rest of the UFO electronics
were quite simple, created
quite a big community of people
that were modifying and improving the
electronics and sensors for the platform.
The exciting development
and knowledge exchange that was happening
in the UFO forum was mostly
German speaking, but the forum provided
a great meeting place for all the
UAV community at that time.
Sadly, the forum was disabled
without a warning earlier this year, but
there are efforts to get it back online.
Most of the modifications that were
based on the use of two piezoelectric
gyroscopes and a lot of hot glue.
But even though these modified
versions did not, did not look
pretty. They flew better
than the original since they
did not suffer from progression or the
flip of death.
No, no. Nonetheless, the sensors
were difficult to get in single units.
The piezo electric sensors suffered from
temperature drift and mounting them
perfectly perpendicular to the airframe
was quite a tricky, quite a trick.
Thanks to those two sensors, it was
possible to stabilize
the most unstable two axis,
namely the
if you say the front is here
to pitch and the roll axis.
So these are the two that
this would stabilize.
This is when the inventors of the
platform, Daniel Gordon and Klaus Michel
Dot, came back into the
picture together with two
of their college friends, Young Stone
and Michel acrylic.
They found it ascending technologies.
They produced their 3D
puzzle gyroscope board that was a drop
in replacement for the mechanical
gyroscope.
That was quite an important part and
quite an improvement.
The 3D board added
one more axis of measurement, making your
so the vertical rotation
all stabilized to.
While it was a commercial product, the
development inspired a few
other people to work on their own
incarnations of quadcopter electronics
and solutions.
Among them was micro copter.
Micro copter was mentioned in there
for the first time in a UFO
forum post in October 2006.
Many of you might know of them already.
They provided access to their source code
and had quite a well documented
circuitry.
This was great, even though they were
not technically licensed, licensed as
open source, but something completely
proprietary with very questionable
status.
The Micro Copter Control Board came
with seven degrees of measurement.
Adding a three axis accelerometer,
so a linear motion in all
three axis
that measured the Earth's gravitational
acceleration, providing the absolute
down vector.
This allowed for the platform to stay
horizontal with a smaller amount of
drift. This feature allowed
one to release the remote control stakes
a bit before the quattro copter drifted
into something horizontally.
It also came with a barometer providing
an absolute altitude information
and making it possible for the
vehicle to remain at an set altitude
by itself.
Another platform that I would like to
mention was the Welfare, a board
also known as the unmanned aerial
video platform you AVP project.
As far as I know, it was open
since it was possible to access the
source code.
I am not precisely sure about the exact
history of the project and whether it was
actually inspired by the UFO,
but at the time during which they
were developed are very close.
The platform used more sophisticated
macro mechanical sensors.
This made it quite a bit more expensive,
but it also much more.
It was much more stable in flight.
This stability made it much better as
a video camera platform
out of and
out of that particular project you, AVP
Nji emerged to composed
of a new group of people and its
own separate philosophy.
This is and
this new group mainly targeted Quadro
copters high quality sensors, and
it was meant for those who wanted to
assemble the electronics themselves.
They regularly released a stable
source code under open source licenses.
And as far as I can tell,
their goal was a very high level
of software stability and best
sensors available on the market
and an advanced feature set.
But since I'm here and the creator
of this project is likely
sitting here in the audience,
he can tell you the details of that
history better himself.
They have an assembly here,
so you should go and visit them.
I bet they will be very happy to answer
all of your questions.
In the midst of all that development, a
three axis magnetometer was added,
resulting in 10 degrees of measurement
and absolute information about the
heading of the aircraft.
The addition and the
addition to the platforms that I already
mentioned
there, there were many
more other platforms to come
to our mock up to our copilot
with varying levels of openness and
availability of the hardware.
Most of the project originated here in
Germany, and it took quite a while
before it finally caught on in the US.
For example, Jordi Munoz started
working on his own iyamu for
Arduino that later became the
pilot.
Around January 2008,
this over
time resulted in thriving commercial
companies like 3D robotics.
As most of the solutions already
contained a controller of some kind and a
lot of sensors, it was an obvious next
step to add a GPS and start teaching
quadcopters to fly by themselves.
So this development was happening
from both directions.
The autonomy focused competition
and research driven projects like
paparazzi from one side and
hobby multi copter driven projects from
the other, the paparazzi group developed
its own controller board dedicated
to quadcopters, called Vous,
together with its algorithmic flight
plans and flexible ground station
software originally developed for fixed
wing airplanes.
It started to morph into an airborne
robotics framework rather than a pure
airplane autopilot.
Paparazzi was adopted by many
universities, as well as a bunch of
commercial companies.
The universities and companies help to
improve the platform and add features
for the benefit of everyone involved.
Thanks to the people involved, too, we
are able to push the boundaries of what
we can do with civilian drones
every day.
Other projects that came from the
quadcopter and hobby side of things
started adding Position Holt and
then Waypoint Flight plans
to their existing stabilization,
hardware and software.
So where are we now?
Almost all open source autopilot
systems of today, like our two pilot,
open pilot and paparazzi.
Support fixed wing airplanes in
many configurations, a single engine,
twin engine flaps, a layer on elevators,
flaperon 11s and
so on.
Multi copter not only
quadcopters by a laundry list of
different configurations similar to
airplanes, but even more so.
Three four eight 12 motors in
X plus and over and
under configurations.
It is quite overwhelming how many
possibilities this approach provides.
Basically, attach a few motors with
with propellers to a bunch of struts,
and you will probably be able to make it
fly.
Helicopters started the whole open source
controller story, but to be honest, since
the dawn of the multi copters, they do
not seem to be the most common choice
for conversion into a drone.
The main reason is the cost of
operation. The helicopter has a lot of
very intricate mechanical parts
that are expensive to manufacture.
And if your software screws
up and you crash, the fund becomes
quite expensive very quickly.
They are still being used in
situations where you need a long flight
time, it is easier to put together a
turbine or a combustion engine driven
helicopter than a multi copter.
Recently, though, very cheap, very small
helicopters have become available from
China, making the helicopter an
interesting platform again.
More on that later.
A new category of vehicles called
transitioning vehicles is emerging.
This is a combination between a fixed
wing aircraft and a multi rotor
transitioning vehicle could cause take
off vertically can hover
and on a flip of a switch
or a software comment can transition
into a forward flight,
making it quite more efficient.
And this can be also achieved by tilting
the engines themselves and not the whole
vehicle, as far
as I know, paparazzi is the only platform
so far that supports this new aircraft
class in the vanilla codebase base,
including autonomous flight,
but other projects seems to seem to
be catching up slowly.
Many projects used
atmo or pick microcontrollers, eight
bit architecture and 16 megahertz
clock, or, even worse, Arduino.
But now
most of the projects are using
ARM 30 32 bit
processors that provide enough processing
power to do some fun stuff without
the programmers having to cope to decode
extortionists.
This enables us to think about
adding real time OS for managing
processes, for example, and encryption
to the telemetry links run more
sophisticated estimation for more
accurate control or run intelligent
path planning algorithms.
The sensors have come quite a long
way as well
for the last few years with
the thanks to the ongoing development of
cell phone technology.
The prices of micro mechanical
sensors have dropped significantly
so that they have become affordable.
They might not be the greatest, but they
are good enough for most applications.
And instead of paying $30
per degree of measurement, we
pay six dollars for six degrees of
measurement, or $13
for nine degrees of measurement
measurement in a single chip.
Even though there are many
different boards at the court, they have
converged quite a bit.
What they differ in most is the size
and what integrated features they have,
like radio communications, a video
overlay circuitry server connections
and communication channels to sensors and
actuators.
Here's a sample of a project listed here
is only an excerpt out of paparazzi
supported autopilot comparison table.
As you can see, there are plenty to
choose from.
On the software side of things, the
feature that even the simplest systems
with a GPS support provide is position
and altitude hold, sometimes
also called loiter for
hovering vehicles, this feature is quite
obvious the aircraft stays on a
spot at a designated altitude
in case of an airplane.
This means flying circles around a
set spot.
A simple extension to that feature is
homing when powering
on the aircraft, remembers the
coordinates as its home position
during the flight.
At any time, it is possible to flip
a switch or press a button
that will make the aircraft fly straight
back to that spot.
It is a great safety feature
and an aircraft saver for beginners,
as well as experienced pilots.
For Follow Me, an operator is
carrying a GPS receiver, and
the aircraft then follows the position of
the GPS receiver like a virtual leash.
I have the feeling this feature is not
fully explored yet.
I can't imagine using such a feature
to convert the aircraft into
my personal cameraman.
When flying an aircraft equipped
with a gimbal camera, it is possible
to tell the autopilot to point the camera
at a specific point on the ground.
This feature is used very often by
reporters and filmmakers.
Waypoint navigation is, in my opinion,
the minimal feature that needs to be
provided before a project can claim
that they support autonomous flight.
This means it is you don't steer
the aircraft yourself using
a remote control.
Instead, you mark GPS coordinates
on a map and the aircraft can navigate
between those points.
An extension of the waypoint navigation
our survey pattern flights.
In this case, the operator makes an
area, marks an area on the map
and tells the aircraft to fly a pattern
that will cover the whole area.
That is a very useful that is very
useful when you are generating maps,
surveying crop fields, searching or
studying tree canopy in the
rainforest, for example.
Almost all systems support some kind
of geofencing.
This means that if the aircraft leaves
a virtually fenced off area,
it is possible to perform some kind
of an emergency maneuver
depending on the regulations or emission
requirements. It can then try to fly
back home, switch off the engine
and drop to the ground
or stay put and gain altitude
instead of continuing the mission.
There is a lot of more mission
actions that almost all mature project
support by now.
But these are mostly static
flight plans and the conditions
change. And if the conditions change,
one has to have connection to the
aircraft to perform its
in-flight alterations to the mission
plan.
And improvement on that is using
dynamic flight plans.
One possible dynamic flight plan solution
is implemented in the paparazzi platform.
The first class citizen of a flight
plan is not a waypoint, but a block.
Each such block, consisting of multiple
multiple stages, represents
an action.
The actions can be setting system
variables, altering waypoints, executing
autopilot functions or performing
a jump to other blocks based
on the system variables.
This variables represent either sensors
or counters.
This solution represents a dynamic,
domain specific language in which
one can implement a dynamic flight
plan.
Each block is statically compiled see
routine on the grounds as part
of the Autopilot firmware, so
the flight plan implementation is
safe from accidental change in flight,
but still can react
based on conditions providing flexibility
without compromising code size,
restrictions and safety.
A very similar system is implemented
in the glue pilot, too.
Here, I need to give them some props
because they are saying on their website
that it is exactly
the way paparazzi did it.
The open pilot team
is working on another solution that
they are planning to release in the
future. It uses a Python
interpreter running on board
the aircraft that can manipulate the
waypoints and probably also
the flight vector. But we will see how
that works when that feature
is documented and released to the public.
There are many more things that
we already can do, but
this is how far we've got in the past
10 years.
Now let's try to predict
a little bit into the future.
Or rather, let me tell you what I hope
you will be working on next.
Let us start with a great example of what
it's working very well so far.
Paparazzi Sumo is,
for example, that I have here on
the stage with me.
It's the aircraft here.
It is it
has been used for quite a while now by
metrological research groups
as a reusable weather balloon
with basic training, the researchers that
never flew in RC airplane
before before it can take
the soon launch it and gather humidity
and temperature and wind information
in our columns, thanks
to the efforts of the people like Martin
Miller. It is.
It has become a standard tool that is
as important as about balloons
themselves.
Based on that, I believe we
will see more drones used as
sensor platforms.
For that. I hope we will see more people
like Martin Miller, who will make
sure the solutions are standardized
and deliver very repetitive results.
On the other side of the spectrum.
I was shocked to hear that a simple
seeming competition, the outback
challenge is still unclaimed.
The mission consists of taking off
from a runway flying to a field
that is 9.3 kilometers away.
Searching as 7.5 square
kilometer area for a bright
yellow dummy and then
dropping a half liter bottle of water.
It's a bit bigger than this
to the designated position.
This sounds like a very simple job, but
since the first competition in 2009,
the main prize is still unclaimed.
Teams were getting very, very close, but
not close enough to
claim the main prize.
I have been told that the main reasons
why teams fail is because the rules and
requirements of the mission are overly
demanding.
So let's hope that the big prize will
be claimed this year.
But this has been made clear
that the civil use drones are
still very much in their infancy.
Drone technology, as well as the
regulations regarding
them, are in need of advancement
in order to mature.
There is still a lot of pioneering work
to be done.
One striking development is
miniaturization.
There are plenty of very cheap and
whatever quality toys in this area,
but I believe this will
be a starting point for an interesting
burst of innovation, just like UFO
did during its time.
There are already a few of
the first really cool open source
projects emerging, for example, Crazy Fly
by Bit Grace.
It comes with all the basic 10
degrees of measurement sensors and
their own custom radio
that you can connect to your laptop.
The API is very well documented
and the source code is released under
open source license.
This makes it the device very
compelling to anyone interested in
experimenting with drones from the
comfort of their chair.
People, people are already doing very
interesting things with it, like
controlling it, using Microsoft Kinect or
adding sensors, so it bounces off
the walls without touching them or
adding their own 3D print and custom
parts to the airframe.
I think we will be seeing very
cool stuff emerging based on this
project.
Other project that I am closely involved
in is the development of Liza
s in collaboration with the Technical
University in Delft, the Liza,
as is just the brain electronics.
So just the pure autopilot of a UAV,
I designed it to be as small as possible,
making the size of a medium
postage stamp about two point
two by two centimeters.
It contains the 10 degrees of measurement
sensors, a powerful arm microcontroller
with half a megabyte of flash, as well
as a GPS receiver module while weighing
only two point five grams.
I have it here on the stage with me,
so maybe it will be even smaller.
Yeah.
So.
Just like Crazy Fly.
I also developed a custom radio.
The main reason was to
save some more space and wait.
The difference between super bitter and
crazy fly solution is the compatibility
with the Spectrum RC control system.
This solutions allows us to
have telemetry with the laptop, computer
or tablet and
standard model aircraft controller
at the same time using only one
module on the aircraft.
Normally, these two channels are
implemented using two separate radio
systems.
The initial motivation was an auto
pilot for a low cost micro helicopter
airframe as a retrofit solution,
providing additional lead to this
standard tandem.
Also a GPS receiver module,
making it a perfect fully autonomous
for fully autonomous flights.
And because it is just a pure brain
part of the system, it makes it easy
to mount on other airframe types do like
Quadro copters or airplanes like this
tiny things from China, for example.
So you can just retrofitted
with the with the board, and you should
be able to fly autonomously with it.
As I mentioned, we mounted aGPS
on the laser as making it useful for
outdoor applications.
It is quite still not
quite accurate as we would like,
but thanks to companies like Swift
Navigation, we will be getting a sub
1000 AHTC GPS systems
that will provide a centimeter
accuracy at 50 hertz.
This is quite an improvement from current
GPS solutions that provide best
case accuracy of three meters
at 10 hertz.
This is a significant step forward
for outdoor applications, for example,
from small separation swarms
where you fly the aircraft really close
to each other and you can draw things in
in air with them, for example,
or fully autonomous aerobatic
flight, because this module also
supports really high
accelerations.
What you have big problems with
commercial modules
or this is also a commercial module, but
the modules that you can currently buy on
the market
or precision farming mapping and so on.
But what about indoor applications?
Sadly, indoor applications autonomous
flight is still very, very challenging.
And there's there are some
solutions available, mostly for research
groups that with really, really deep
pockets.
For example, infrared camera
tracking systems.
These are the same systems used
to capture the motion of actors for
3-D movies like Gollum four
from Hobbit, for example.
They're great.
Very accurate and fast
thanks to the solutions like this.
Groups like Grass at Pennsylvania
and University and idiocy
at E.T.A. Sir, it can create
incredibly amazing demos.
I bet you have seen their videos of swarm
flights snapped, optimize flight planning
or ball juggling Commodore copters.
The problem is that an infrared tracking
system like this is a very expensive
and because of this out of reach or even
the very rich hobbyists
or less wealthy universities.
Beside the cost, one has to dedicate
a room for the micro UAV in
order to mount the cameras in the
room at very accurate positions.
You can't just go with your drone
anywhere and perform autonomous flight.
So I'm throwing it out there.
We need to work on some solutions
that we will have the following feature
set high accuracy.
Relatively cheap.
No environment modification needed.
Light and very small.
Low energy and computational
requirements, there are
many approaches to solving
this problem.
Maybe laser based radar, maybe
computer vision, who knows?
There are some very promising
technologies on the horizon.
One of them comes from a company called
Technical Illusions.
They are developing a new kind of
virtual reality 3D glasses.
The thing in the middle of the glasses
is a tiny cell phone camera connected
to an FPGA.
They also will make a metal
gate tariff, a version of it to
bring down the cost
in PCs, as well as
a need of power.
It can track a blinking infrared
led pattern at 100 frames per
second, providing a submillimetre,
accurate position and rotation
of the user's head.
I am looking forward of mounting one of
those on a nano drone.
Another solution comes from two Delft.
It was released just a few days ago.
It is a tiny stereoscopic vision module
from four. They are micro
flapping wing platform called Delphi.
The system is based on the parallax
effect of binocular vision,
just like we humans and
every animal with front facing eye does
using two cameras, this module can
also see depth not only for a flat
image. It is not a totally
new concept, and what it is
is the size.
As you can see, it is pretty small and
thus light.
It can detect obstacles.
And according to Mavela, it is also quite
affordable.
It enables to Dell fly to and navigate
autonomously.
Definitely. The videos look very
promising, so here is like a time
lapse recording of the
position of the aircraft, how it is
flying in a room completely with no
human control input.
I think we are almost out of time, so.
So let me let me
leave you with a thought in the
world of PC software.
We know about continuous integration,
coding standards, static code
tests and so on.
It is really hard to embed
for embedded systems and thus
for all drone types.
I know many projects out there do
software compilation tests
and static code analysis on their
software.
But something I know we should work on
is better reliability testing and flights
for flight software we put
on our toys.
I know this will not happen overnight,
but it is something we should
make a priority of.
I know this is not as much fun
as flying them or developing new
algorithms, but I would be.
It would be a huge benefit not only in
this field, but other embedded system
areas to be able to do better
regression and reliability testing.
I know of the fact that
there are some approaches provided
as part of commercial development
packages. What we need, though,
are open source solutions for automatic
regression and unit testing tools for
embedded systems.
If anyone here would like to volunteer
any solutions, that's why I'm telling
you that I would
really love to hear from you.
Thank you for your time and I
think we will be going to questions
now. I guess.
As always, we have four mikes, two
there, two there, just line up.
Also IAC and Twitter.
We already have a question there.
Go ahead, please.
OK, so all the numbers survey pit
floods pretty useful for producing
aerial photos, for example, for open
street maps where you can
draw a map based on these photos.
Are there right now, economically
affordable solutions for that?
And can you say something
about the legal complications
there?
So affordable
solutions? The most affordable solution
is definitely to build it yourself from
some artsy parts
a that you just buy off
the shelf and then put an autopilot on it
from any of those projects,
like paparazzi.
In this case, you can buy the electronics
and put them in.
I'm pretty sure this is more affordable
than buying an off the shelf, fully
integrated and solution
the the
the so basically that
it's there. So this sumo project, for
example, is one of those that are built
by by a by a group
of people that are using an Open-Source
platform for this.
And there
are other solutions.
I think
our drone, the company,
the parrots, they bought something there.
I don't know how affordable they are
because I'm completely uninterested
in buying anything from the shelf
anyways. So I don't know.
I rather build it myself anyways and to
exactly suited the application.
And it definitely is fully doable
with the paparazzi platform, and I'm
pretty sure that others have some
solutions for that too.
The legal implications
this is this is
a this is difficult to say.
It's like I'm not a lawyer,
and that's why I'm not talking about
the legal stuff at all because
I know what I may
do, where I may fly, and
I am happy that I grasped that
and getting into like, what
are the regulations? You have to really
look locally where you are, what
right, what rights you have, who you have
talked to talk to.
It's like still everything in the
infancy. As I said in the talk, it's
we are still working on the regulation
side of things, as you everyone here
might know. But
but it's like we as a community
from the open source side, we have to
really, really push hard so that the
regulations make sense because what
is seems to be coming is really
horrible. And but
I'm speaking to the choir here, right?
OK, thank you.
Number three, please.
I was also asking, I'm going to
ask about the legal implications in
regards to arrest and may
go to or altitudes you can fly.
Maybe there's a certain
space where you can fly under a certain
altitude. Do you know at least where we
can research that sort of stuff?
What resources do you use to find out
about that?
Yeah.
Well, it's like
Google for it. But yeah, no.
It's like in
there is stick here in Germany, there
is a club for
RC airplane fliers.
This is basically the rule so that you
will apply to most, most of people that
are trying to do this.
The problem is exactly the regulation
part of things is the problem that as
soon as it is not a hobby anymore,
there's not really any regulations
available. And if they are available and
people think that they know what the
regulations should be, it is.
No, you may not and please
don't compete with the big guys because
we have the money.
So basically, that's what it ends up
being for the altitude part of things.
It's I think
in Germany, it's like 500 meters
altitude maximum
grant or an off the
ground.
So AGL, not
not for altitude.
So if you are in the mountains above
500 meters, you still may fly 500
meters above the mountain.
But about
this is only far away from an airport.
As far as I know, if you're near and
near an airport, you, I think,
are very restricted to 100 meters or
something, but it's similar
rules apply. Also in the U.S., it's like
400 feet maximum
altitude.
And so if you are below five, um,
am I right, five kilos, then
you may fly also outside of a designated
field. Yeah.
So thanks.
So we offer Amazon lawyers to sort it
sort of things out for us and we may fly
to.
Yeah, that wasn't a nice gag.
What they did there.
Yeah, it's like
No.
Four, please.
Hi.
If I understood you correctly, you said
you're only working on free software
platforms and.
I was
wondering if you think about
introducing nonmilitary
classes to those licenses.
Well, if you add them, you are not
Open-Source anymore, right, because you
are excluding a group, so you may not
discriminate anyone if
you want to be really open source.
So adding a nonmilitary rule to
it is against that rule.
Thus, you are not really open source.
So this is my take on this.
And yes, I would love to block
the military. But on the other hand, they
have much better choice anyway, so it
doesn't matter.
One more from the internet, please.
OK, how secure are the
solutions you presented for controlling a
drone against the though?
So how easy is it to take control over
a drone that my, yeah, my
pal is controlling right now?
So this is what I mentioned.
Also in the talk, it is a problem
currently. It's like it's completely
non encrypted. It's like, basically we
are at this stage, like the internet
started out a practically is still
it's like all unencrypted stuff running
everywhere around.
So like you run, there
was a great example from the hack five
guys. Just again few days ago,
it was a great video where Darren Kitchen
took like an IRA drone.
And I think a
DJI other quadcopter put
a pineapple on it, flew
to the drone and overtook its
Wi-Fi and controlled it from there.
So it's it's obviously
bad we have to work on this
now.
But yeah, that's it's really necessary
to do. It's like, we need to secure this.
OK, thank you.
Number two, please.
Yeah.
Commercial aircraft use a radio
beacon system even even
today to navigate between
waypoints over
pretty much the entire globe.
And this is without this was done before
GPS. Yeah, have it
since many institutions,
buildings, etc.
have a Wi-Fi network or some other
industrial radio network.
Has there been any research done in using
these, like individual
APIs or individual radios
for for navigation?
I'm thinking of like, you know, following
a Mac address
to a Mac address.
Yeah.
So there were some efforts.
I saw some, some some
universities mentioning that they were
working on things like that
for if for a fact, I could take the
words. Also recently, some news that
Apple was deploying like position
tracking of iPhones to
track their customers in their stores
with quite high accuracy.
So theoretically, that technology would
be there to use Wi-Fi
hotspots to as basically
radio beacons.
I don't know of any go to
solution. That's the problem.
It's like there are some DIY
things here and there with varying
degree of accuracy and reliability
and documentation.
But it's
like, I don't know if I think this is
also one of the possible approaches,
but I'm just
looking forward to see if
someone comes up with some really nice
solution where it's like, Oh, this works.
Yeah, because this seems like you could
be a highly accurate
because they're they're these tend to be
fixed position, you know, your IP
networking staff, how are you going to
know exactly where they are?
So you should be able to construct a
route?
Yeah, but they're being already used, for
example, for augmenting your cell phone
GPS position accuracy
today. So.
And like Google and
Apple, I think they're mapping also,
though. So yeah, it's a I'm
looking forward to see some something
that is not a huge brick that
I could put on on one of my quadcopter
send testers. I'm curious to see that.
Thanks, internet.
Just a short, short one.
Are you?
Do you know about the challenge
about that? Excellent.
Are they allowed to refuel during the
mission?
As far as I know, I think, yeah, there
is something you may come back
after you scan the field
back home so that they can drop
off pictures, find it so
that you don't really need to solve
everything, including the finding out
anonymously.
So I I bet you can refuel
in that stage when you come back, but you
still can reach you.
I don't think you can go to the field
several times and refuel
between passes, so you have to
do go there and scan the whole field
in one go. I think this is what it is,
but don't hold
that to me. So.
OK, thanks.
Mike, one, please.
What are the
one or two main areas where commercial
systems are more advanced than
open source solutions?
And why is it is the time,
the money, the smarts?
That's a difficult one.
So, yeah, definitely there are commercial
systems that do some things
better or different than
the open source solutions.
One thing is there is the obvious one
that you have with a lot of open source
projects in general.
They are
much more
tested, I think, or they are like,
basically, they are not adding so much
stuff so quickly so that this system
is is
getting a little bit unstable at times.
So they are like, OK, very
conservatively, we are the future.
We test it truthfully and then
we consider maybe we should release
it. At least some companies do,
like not all of them.
Like, I know that 3D robotics is
releasing hardware that is
like half tested and then they have to do
revision after revision.
And not even, you don't know
as a customer when you buy it that it's
something changed, that the previous
one was broken. But anyways, maybe they
are doing some communication telling
the customers, but this is what
I heard.
But then there are commercial companies
that are like, fully commercial and
closed that
really do. Also,
it's more robust.
I would say the solution this is
from the feature set
from the feature set.
There are more like the mechanical
solutions, for example.
I think the there are some some solutions
to have, like a hook on the wing so you
can land on the boat very easily.
So you have a string hanging from a crane
on the boat and you can hook it in.
But I am pretty sure we could just build
it. Also, go on a
C and see cut apart and do that to
ourselves, Stu. But no one I don't know
of anyone trying that themselves.
Otherwise, from the features again, from
the feature set, I don't know
it probably enough about the commercial
systems to say what they really have.
Maybe I should really actually do that
and see what we need more
to concentrate more in open source.
But what we have to concentrate more
is definitely
reliability and rip
it repetitively
anyway. So basically thinks
like this sumo.
That's why I showed Sumo, because this is
Martin Miller with his guys really
put the energy to make this thing
fly every single time and
work every time.
This is like a rare thing in their whole
open source world where it's like, This
is the solutions. This is how you build
it and you have a tool
like a hammer.
Internet.
How critical do you see the fact that the
UAV challenge you mentioned is
platinum sponsored by Northrop Grumman,
which is a military
cooperation?
Yeah. So from the moral standpoint, I
think it's it's crap, but
from the other standpoints, they have too
much money anyway. So we should take it.
OK.
So your your point is still that the
military already has better stuff
and.
Well, they they have better stuff
that costs way too much money.
This is why they're interested in
our stuff because it's much cheaper
and we choose solutions that
they wouldn't even come up with because
it doesn't have 50 certificates
on it, basically.
OK.
Mike, one.
OK, I've heard as a branch of science
that investigates real animals
like birds and flies and
to take inspiration from that to build
machines. Does it play a role for your
research?
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
It's like.
So the first quadcopter ever
was built by imager.
It was before even the helicopter
that we know today was
even conceived.
It was a quadcopter, the first vertical
takeoff vehicle at all, and
he was inspired by by dragonflies
and their flight.
So the propellers
that he used on this were already
back then inspired by
by birds.
And definitely the further you go like,
for example, they fly the flapping
wing aircraft, it's of course
it's
biomimicry, right?
So you are trying to copy copy
the animals.
OK, internet, go ahead.
What kind of scenarios can we expect in
the future, apart from the current
positioning, acceleration and orientation
sensors? Do you have any ideas on
which sensors additional sensors?
So yeah, that's that's basically the the
problem here. It's like for the EC,
we have everything to do autonomous
flight very well outdoors.
It's like on the airplanes you have
one additional sensor is that Peter,
too. So to get airspeed,
so you can do control on that, but this
is also a normal part of the control
system on an airplane.
But on the road
aircraft's sake
we are putting, I think we have
everything to do with autonomous flight
by now. But what will come are
other sensors that make it more, maybe
more accurate to say you don't like
to keep the altitude more correct
at ground level.
There are ultrasound sensors
being used,
but it really also depends on the mission
and the and the environment that you're
running and don't facing cameras
just like our airdrome does for
optical flow.
This is something they are using.
I'm into.
Yeah, pick the guys picks, OK?
They have optical force
sensor that they are putting on their
stuff. It's a it's it's
definitely coming to, but it really
the minimum set, in my opinion,
to do. Autonomous flight is the tandem
plus GPS solution.
So and then you have basically everything
you will you will get definitely other
sensors, depending on the mission and
what you want to do.
The indoor navigation, though, yes, the
indoor navigation, there will be
something will come.
I really hope so. That's why I hope
that's why I'm talking to you guys,
because the smarts
are we have to put our heads all
together because it's so
interdisciplinary.
This is also the thing here with the
drones. It's like it's
machining, it's electronics, it's
software. It's it's our
dynamics. It's everything, it's like it's
not and not a
area where you can just
concentrate only on your part what
you know about and
and you will you won't be able
to operate. You have to talk to so many
people in many disciplines.
And that's why I think
I really hope that someone
will come up with really great solutions
that no one thought about before because
they are just thinking out of the box.
Thanks, Mike.
One, please.
OK. Do you have an overview of
the race integration rapid operation
system in open source platform?
Yeah. So Ross
Ross integration is is ongoing.
I am, I know that, but there is
like there is some adapter for modeling,
I think for the autopilot stuff.
And paparazzi has also some adapters for
us. It has a converter from the Ivy
Ivy bus that it is using on the ground
station. How good is this working?
Uh, as far as I know, it works,
so I didn't try
it myself, so I can tell you, but
I. Hmm.
Yeah.
But this is not an open source platform,
as tech has as a commercial
platform has a Ross integration.
But yeah, this is something I would
love to see. Like someone who is actually
really using Ross
Tech I use draws in different research
in the past myself.
It's it's a great platform, so I would
love to see it properly integrated
with paparazzi, for example.
As far as I know, as I said, it has an
adapter.
People were using it.
I don't know how well it works, though,
because most of the missions and
most of the stuff that is being done with
this platform normally doesn't require
to run with Ross.
Additionally, it is for definitely
for multi-platform
operation where you have to communicate
with different with rovers and
robots and humanoid robots.
You would need that, yes.
But again, I don't know
of anyone who is involved in this project
to be actually involved in this.
You're welcome.
Thanks, Mike.
Three, Please.
When you're talking about
regression tests, what do we really want
to test and
where would you like to start?
So as I'm
mostly a low level embedded
person, it's like I
would love to find a way
I say can treat really thinking
hard how to do it.
But it's like I didn't come up with
a reasonable solution is
to be able to even be able to test
the drivers on the lower level.
It's like with the IO, with the hardware
connected, there's this really hard
problem because you probably have to
build some custom hardware to
be able to run those tests with feedback
loops and like switches and whatever.
People are doing some things along those
lines. But this is something I would
start with because it's this is what I
do. But other things is
on the very high level.
There is some simulation stuff.
This is an interesting thing.
I know people are working on this, this
will come, but it's basically
that you have a simulation
running. You basically take the newest
revision from the code base and you
fly an autonomous flight plan in
simulation. And if it deviates from
certain parameters, then it will start
screaming like something broke.
And this is something completely
the opposite side and everything in
between needs to be tested to.
And so basically, that's why I'm saying
it's like, I know there are people that
are software engineers that are like, Oh,
a drone Quadro copter.
I don't know. It's like, it's too much,
too much soldiering and too stinky.
But there is there are real software
engineering problems in that
in that area that
that we need the help of those people
that are really have their head deep
in software to solve this.
So you would like to decouple the sensors
from the PC B and inject
simulated
simulators or areas.
It's like, yes, there is software in the
loop. It already exists, but it is not
an automated test system.
OK. That's what I mean.
It's like, yes, you can do it on your
laptop. You can run it in simulation.
No problem, but it's like, how
do you integrate it in a platform that
runs on a server somewhere, a client
and just just goes through this
every day when there are new comments?
OK?
Internet, please.
Okay.
What batteries have the best power
density and are available to the public?
Who?
That's like another home, and we don't
need to manufacture another, but just the
technology a.
As far as I know, it is still
lithium polymer, but
I might be wrong.
That changed by now.
I know that
leafy pool or is
the abbreviation have the advantage
that you can charge them faster.
But I I'm pretty sure they don't have
the density of capacity.
So I think lithium polymer
is still the best.
But tell me if I'm wrong.
OK, thanks.
I would like to know myself better game
theory. Something better than
this
last question. Number four, please.
For indoor navigation.
Would it be feasible to build something
like a GPS?
But I assume frequencies.
I bet it would.
But it's and
my RF knowledge is not good enough.
So.
So building such a thing is over
my capabilities, basically.
And that's yeah, it's I definitely I
think it is a solution.
I saw something there.
There is also a group that made a
prototype.
They built some antennas and
on poles, put them in four corners
of the room or three corners of the room.
And then they had that receiver and
basically they measured the time of
flight.
You can do it much better where you
measured the carrier phase, right?
It's like, then you have it much more
accurate, just like you do it with GPS.
So but there is again,
there is no there
are some very, very, very expensive
commercial systems that simulate
satellites indoors.
So GPS satellites.
I think this exists, but it is it
is completely beyond any good
or bad in price.
This is like this is not even
the Richard universities can afford that.
I think so.
Yeah, but if this would be, this is
definitely a direction that would work
nicely if someone would
build a platform that like
that.
OK, and we are out of time, please, once
again, thank Estan.