Near the end of this past week, another opportunity for a flight test appeared. While there was not enough time to safely attach the avionics such as the camera or PixHawk 2, the prototype plane will be flying with a dummy payload to test and ensure the prototype’s ability to fly with the weight of the avionics mounted. As this isn’t known for sure, the testing conducted on Sunday at Black Star Canyon will have hugely affect the direction with which the team will take the UAV. If all components are able to be mounted on the prototype, the team will be able to take test mission photos and begin autonomous flight and flight path testing. If the plane cannot safely handle the total weight of the payload, a new prototype will have to be either assembled or designed.

In other news, the avionics and ground station teams have made significant progress in their respective goals. The avionics team successful set up a server for remotely taking and retrieving photos from the Sony a6000 mirror-less camera. However while it worked well in close range testing, when scaling up the distance, the ODroid board (which is connected to the camera and handles interactions with the camera) died. It is unknown why or how this occurred as it does not appear that there was a power failure and the board may have just been bad. A Raspberry Pi 3 will be purchased to replace the ODriod as the lesser processing speed of the Raspberry Pi 3 will not bottleneck the performance of the image transfer as the main bottleneck of the system is the wireless transfer.

Ground Station has nearly finished their flight planning algorithm which finds the fastest and shortest route to all way points (and which avoids all virtual obstacles). Additionally, Ground Station’s image detection algorithms are becoming increasingly accurate and can now detect objects of interest with around 60% confidence. While the real accuracy cannot be computed without images taken mid-flight, the accuracy inspires confidence (though it will continue to be improved upon).

UAV Forge Documentation Officer,

Kenzo Spaulding