3 months of chip flashing, USB hacking, & accoustics reviewing finally paid off with Vika 2 hovering herself. Pretty sure 3D sonar has never hovered a copter successfully before.

Vika 2 did what she was designed to do & proved an autopilot using only 3 crummy gyros & 1 sonar emitter was feasible. It doesn't have enough range to do any of the camera movements we envisioned, but it's definitely enough for a micro copter.

She did indeed use position sensing to correct heading & that actually worked most of the time.

Unfortunately, was so pessimistic about this system ever working, no cameras were present, but we do have some Goog plots.

Mind U, it's a bit much to expect a very large mass with a very slow control system to stay in a 4 cubic meter box directly over the sonar array. When it works, the weather cooperates & everything is aligned, it works better than uBlox5. Did a 6m30s hover & several 3 minute hovers.

We have $40 invested in sonar navigation, so we're still $1930 ahead of Evolution Robotics. As long as U stay in the sonar cone, VikaCopter is the cheapest indoor positioning system & not Northstar.

Because of their 3 lobe cardioid pattern, running the Matsushitas with the shouds on was the lesser evil than losing range. After replacing the shrouds, some brute force hard coding, integrals, smoothing, & reduced expectations, got some pretty nihilistic improvements. Integrating gets U more range. Smoothing the integral gets U the 1" resolution.

Time to begin Vika 3.

NOW TODAY'S VIDEOS

3D position sensing using sonar (1 min 0 sec)

The very first decent results using sonar for 3D position sensing. The tests were hand held in a 4 square meter dumpy apartment & scaled up for rendering on Goog Earth.

1:10 Scale Saturn V with stabilization (1 min 36 sec)

The 1:10 scale Saturn V U all forgot about because it's 5 hours old has been stabilized.

Congrats! Really impressive stuff--can you productize it?

There's no way something with as many applications, as obvious, & as cheap as 3D sonar can stay on a blog for this long without someone already copying it & selling it. It would be a disaster to invest the money in productizing it at this time.

Every toy copter is going to ship with one of these systems within a year. They only need $10 in parts. The question is who is going to sell it first & what is their stock symbol.

Originally Posted by Jack Crossfire

There's no way something with as many applications, as obvious, & as cheap as 3D sonar can stay on a blog for this long without someone already copying it & selling it. It would be a disaster to invest the money in productizing it at this time.

Every toy copter is going to ship with one of these systems within a year. They only need $10 in parts. The question is who is going to sell it first & what is their stock symbol.

How about a hackable/DIY version for hobbyists? If you can produce a reference design and supply the code, we'll manufacture and sell it and pay you royalties.

Bob Gross already has one on the way. In a few months you'll wonder why you even had this discussion.

We have those day jobs where the boss has a hernia any time anyone goes home. It costs him a lot of money for an employee to work on sonar or UAV's. For someone to spend their evenings & weekends doing anything they're not told to do, it better be the biggest, most insane project you can think of & the best chance of recovering the boss's loss is not in a Sparkfun widget but a complete system.