Watch my UAV flight on google maps

[clolson]

This might be good for a couple minutes of amusement ... I'll try and leave it running the rest of today (5/31) and tomorrow (6/1)

Head over to the following web site:

http://mpmap01.flightgear.org/

Click on the check box next to "Rascal1" at the bottom window. This will center you on an aircraft flying in a small area. You can zoom way in to see things better.

You can increase the update rate in the "server" tab to something like 1 second if you like.

Also you can turn on Pilot Trails in the settings tab.

You can minimize the black box at the bottom of the window by clicking on the title bar area.

This morning we went out and flew our UAV (a Sig Rascal 110) and captured data for two flights:

http://www.flightgear.org/~curt/Models/Special/Rascal110_2/

Right now I'm replaying that data (looped) in FlightGear while having my copy of FlightGear connected to our multiplayer server. So my real flight (a replay of it) is injected into the FlightGear multiplayer system. My aircraft shows up in the multiplayer map, and if you connected up and flew over our flying field, you should see my airplane buzzing around. It's a 110" wing span R/C model so it might be a little hard to spot from a full scale aircraft.

We have the ability to feed the live telemetry data into a copy of FlightGear running on the ground, so if we had a net connection out at our field we'd be able to inject our UAV into our multiplayer system in real time which would be kind of a neat trick.

Kind of fun to watch for a minute or two ...

[lvspark]

It was fun and interesting to watch.. Good job you did on that.. First I have seen that interfaced with google... Would be very cool with google earth to see from the side angle.. Really great job!

[kd7ost]

Nice work Curt,

Very cool to see. I wondered what was going on at the Minnesota Skunk works. ;)

Dan

[clolson]

It was fun and interesting to watch.. Good job you did on that.. First I have seen that interfaced with google... Would be very cool with google earth to see from the side angle.. Really great job!

First, I can't take credit for the google map hack. Someone else wrote that, I'm just putting a couple different existing pieces together here.

The google map is a quick easy way to visualize what's going on from a top down view and the aircraft location is referenced against pretty good aerial imagery. By the way, I've been really impressed with how well google maps matches up with the gps position of our uav. You can see us taxi out onto the runway, taxi down to the end, turn around in the grass of the end of the runway, line up, hesitate, and then take off. As we take off, Google maps puts us right on the runway drifting a little left and then correcting, just like it happened in real life. Same for our landing ... According to our gps, we came in pretty hot. Approach was just about 32-33 kts (ground speed) and we touched down at about 25 kts. No wonder we rolled out off the end of the runway into the grass. :-)

I'm feeding the recorded aircraft flight into the FlightGear multiplayer system, so you can go grab a copy of FG, log onto the multiplayer server, go to the location where "Rascal1" is flying and you can watch a full 3d view of the flight. In fact, you can choose an interactive Rascal110 and fly right along with the uav. I had one guy join me earlier today, so there were two Rascal's swooping around the sky. One live simulation and one recorded real flight.

There's maybe not a lot of direct value in just this beyond entertainment, but when you start adding more pieces into the mix it becomes a bit more useful. If you have an onboard camera, the google map could really help give the camera view some context so the person on the ground knows exactly what they are looking at. The multiplayer angle is interesting because you could start tracking multiple uav's and seeing them all on the same map. And if you want to use the flightgear based synthetic view for anything, the other uav's in your fleet will show up in the synthetic view. The synthetic view gives you the ability to click on a point in the scene and get back it's exact lon/lat/elev. Now if we overlayed the camera view on top of the synthetic view we could click on live imagery and get the location of whatever we clicked on. We aren't there yet, but there are a lot of fun ideas to be explored!

This might all sound complicated and difficult, but essentially all we are doing is capturing the telemetry data from the aircraft and feeding it into FlightGear, then we can leverage all the existing capabilities of FlightGear ... hud, instrument panel overlays, 3d visualization, animated 3d aircraft model with moving surfaces, synthetic view of the world, a variety of views/perspectives, multiplayer connections, multiplay google map for tracking, click on terrain to get location, etc. I just noticed we had 72,000 downloads of flightgear just off one of our ftp servers in May. I should start charging a buck a download, or even just 10cents!

On another front, one of our guys here has been working on getting our xbow unav hardware powered and connected and up and running. That's exciting because we'll be able to log, position, orientation, and stick inputs. And it's programmable so we'll be able to set up a variety of autopilot and fly-by-wire modes. I hit a brick wall and explode into little bits when it comes to wiring up hardware and figuring out battery power and the variety of connections and all that terrifying stuff, so I've been really lucky that we have a really sharp guy in our research group who can do all that hard, tricky stuff. If the world was all software, life would be a breeze. :-) If we can make some good headway on the xbow unav and get flying autonomously, it should be a fun summer.

Curt.

[clolson]

Nice work Curt,
Very cool to see. I wondered what was going on at the Minnesota Skunk works. ;)
Dan

It's all based on our instink. :-)

Curt.

[clolson]

The other MN skunk works "low priority" project is to resurrect Rascal #1:

http://www.flightgear.org/~curt/Models/Special/Rascal110_1/Rebuild/

Once I figure out exactly what to do about the sides, I'm home free. The broken bulkheads are all refabricated, but the sides lock everything together and line everything up so I've got to be really careful with those. It's been a while since I scratch built anything ...

For some reason I haven't made any headway convincing the big boss that a groteskly overpowered 1/3rd scale Christen Eagle would make a good v2.0 uav platform, so I'm stuck rebuilding our first Rascal. :-)

[lvspark]

Make that 72,001 downloads! I would have paid a buck for that!

[MattChave]

hi clolson, very very nice. i'll eventually have my telemetry go to flight gear also. I was put off when i read somewhere that they nerfed the topographic data so that we couldnt do this sort of thing but from reading your post it sounds like its all lineing up nicely. so ill go back to working towards getting it into that instead of just sticking it into openGC.

how are you getting the telemetry data into flight gear, i spent ages trying to figure out how to get it into FG. I can stream the data anyway it wants but it would be really nice if i could just go into a serial port.

i understand that FG is able to accept data through an ethernet port and display it but i dont know how to construct the packet. is your work open source? could you point me in the right direction?

thanks
heres my projects website that it would be for:
http://uav.bravehost.com

[clolson]

Matt,

I wrote a separate utility that reads in the telemetry data from the serial port, constructs a FlightGear network packet, and sends it to FlightGear. It's included in the source code distribution so it's open source.

Curt.

[MattChave]

OMG Curtis 4 ever!
thats simply awsome, im just enjoying watching your movies now, they really do line up nicely.

your io readme's very interesting, good stuff. ok, you'll have to excuse me a little here i've never worked on large programs like yours so im struggling a little. is the utility your talking about part of the main flight gear source (FlightGear-0.9.10.tar.gz)? is it something to do with the xdr stuff? could you tell me the relevant filenames perhaps?.
all my programming knowledge is much lower level, "If the world was all" -HARDWARE- ", life would be a breeze" for me.

thanks heaps Curtis, great to get a chance to ask you this, im still blown away that you've already made it!

[clolson]

I believe the code is included in the FlightGear-0.9.10.tar.gz distribution. If not, it's in the "CVS" tree under source/utils/GPSsmooth (I'm less happy with that name as the code has evolved, but I guess I'll live with it for now.)

I can take credit for portions of FlightGear, but we've had 100's of people contribute over the years so my portion grows less and less every day. :-)

[MattChave]

yep found it in there, it'll take me a while but ill play around and try and get it going hopefuly soon. is there any documentation for it?

thats the coolest telemetry setup run for a uav so far. telemetry>serial>ethernet>FG>FGserver>realtime tracking from anywhere.
quite an accomplishment

[clolson]

yep found it in there, it'll take me a while but ill play around and try and get it going hopefuly soon. is there any documentation for it?

thats the coolest telemetry setup run for a uav so far. telemetry>serial>ethernet>FG>FGserver>realtime tracking from anywhere.
quite an accomplishment

Hi Matt,

There's not a lot of documentation for the code that read in the serial data and reformat it into FlightGear packets. There is one utility designed for standard NMEA gps strings and a similar, but more fully developed utility to do this with the output of the Microbotics Inc. MIDG sensor. I can probably answer specific questions if need be.

One of the things I really like about FlightGear is it's flexibility and it's ability to stitch different pieces together to do what you want to do. That and we have some really sharp developers doing some really cool things (such as the google map hack, the ability to click anywhere in the 3d flightgear scene and get back the lon/lat/elev, etc.)

Just as a for instance, here is the latest newsletter for JSBSim (JSBSim is one of the internal flight dynamics engines that FlightGear uses.)

http://jsbsim.sourceforge.net/Newsletter_3_1.pdf

In this newsletter there is an article about using FlightGear to develop a full motion flight simulator for the University of Naples in Italy. Then there is an article by a student at the University of Bristol in England discussing how he has leveraged FlightGear in conjunction with matlab/simulink to develop and validate the flight control systems for the Manta UAV project.

Unfortunately, it's easy to get tied up in the software world and forget to go out and actually fly ... there's never enough time ... :-)

Curt.

[MattChave]

thanks curt, its really inspiring stuff, i have get back into the control system for it for the next couple of weeks and try and get it working better, then move onto getting this up and running, I'm really looking forward to it
cheers
matt