Originally Posted by openuas

The horizon view straight from the airframe of Team OpenUAS during the UAV Outback Challenge mission to find Outback Joe

Nice photos!

I'm curious how you got horizon shots. Did you have a tilt servo on a camera to allow it to point forwards, or did you pitch the aircraft up to get this?

All our photos are straight down (except when in turns that are beyond the servo limit of our roll stabiliser) so we didn't get any nice horizon shots :-)

Cheers, Tridge

So did the UAV that located Joe do it autonomously? There are reports in the media either way.

Originally Posted by ant_esp

So did the UAV that located Joe do it autonomously? There are reports in the media either way.

yes, it did. I'm writing up a full report now, and I'll post a link when its complete.

Cheers, Tridge

We've written up a report on our OBC attempt this year here:

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/...e-2012-debrief

In your debrief you mention having to do a comms failure test ,were you required to do this with the plane in flight to see if it would loiter? How was this test done .
thanks in advance ,great work.

Originally Posted by erasertech

In your debrief you mention having to do a comms failure test ,were you required to do this with the plane in flight to see if it would loiter? How was this test done .
thanks in advance ,great work.

yes, it was during the autonomous part of the scrutineering flight. The scrutineers asked us to induce a comms failure, and they watched to see that the aircraft headed to the "airfield home" comms hold point within 10 seconds of the failure. It then loitered about that point, until we were told we could end the test, and re-establish comms.
In our case we'd asked the scrutineers in advance if we could induce a comms failure by disabling the GCS heartbeat sent to the plane, rather than turning the radios completely off. They agreed with that, which allowed us to continue to receive telemetry from the plane, which was nice (for logging, and seeing that we were well clear of the geo-fence).
I think some other teams (such as CompassUAV) just turned off their radios instead.

Cheers, Tridge

Locking this thread up for another year guys, well done to all teams in the 2012 UAV Outback Challenge

Mick