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.
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| 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.
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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.'
