Building a robotic bird

[Messenger]

Let me begin with a brief introduction of myself. I am Suchit, a college student (3 semesters into EE). I am working on this project of making a remote-controlled robotic bird autonomous. This is actually my first experience with robots. I have a hitec laser 6 kit with a transmitter, receiver, and 4 servos.

I wonder if anyone has some experience building a robotic bird before? I would greatly appreciate any advise as to where I should start with my project.

[eflightray]

For a robotic bird I would assume you mean with flapping wings, if so have a look in the Ornithopters forum (http://www.rcgroups.com/ornithopters-101/) where you will find all the wing flapping mechanisms, and also links to commercially available bird like models.

[Messenger]

Thank you for the URL.

Ya, it is a flapping wing model. Right now it is radio-controlled. Graduate students out here built it. I am interning for the summer, working on making it autonomous. Figured out what I wanna do. I am replacing the analog pots in my HiTec Laser 6 with digital ones, and writing a software for varying the resistance, which will cause signal to be sent to the receiver on the bird.

Regards,
Suchit

[eflightray]

I wish you luck, but.....

How does the Tx get feedback from the bird to know what corrections to send? if say the nose dips or rises, or the turn is too tight or...... the possibilities are vast. The Tx would need to know what correction to apply for yaw, roll, and pitch changes?

I hate to put too many possible problems in your path, but when you fly a model aircraft you are getting instant feedback from your eyes and continually inputting corrections if required to maintain a flight path.

If you have flown a model, imaging what it would be like to fly blindfolded so that there is no visual feedback.

Sorry for the negatives, but unless the 'autonomous' flight program is kept to something very very simple the margin for errors is going to give major problems.

[sonicjet]

How big is it,can you use futaba afs gyros?

[orni-freak]

I don't think anyone has made a completely "autonomous" ornithpter before. you will need to somehow fit a camera and a tiny, but really good computer on it so it is a truely robotic bird. Good luck!!