We're Alive

So some good news came in today. Well, it's generally not good news that $500 was withdrawn from your bank account, but in this case it is because it means our application for the project went through. While I'm at it, why is information for this competition so hard to find?! I can't even find a contact point for the competition. The website doesn't even have standings from previous years or an archive of reports (it does have the 2007 papers though, linked to the right). Anyway, the links to the right were reorganized a bit. A few more were added too, check it out.

In terms of progress, the currently small team has started its first tasks. Although most of it is research it is rather important research. Matt and I will be looking into flight state acquisition and the many methods to achieve it. Hopefully we'll get those findings onto the blog. Gerard and Jerry in the mean time will be doing an initial design and sizing of our plane. Configuration conditions such as using a high wing for stability instead of complicating manufacturing with a dihedral are about the things they'll be considering. By the end of it we should have a good idea and sketch of what the plane will look like and where the payload will be. Gaurav will be spending some time become our team expert on gas motors, something we need considering that we've never made a plane with a gas motor before.

Worth noting is that our aircraft performance & stability and aircraft design professor (er, lecturer) Damian Toohey is willing to officially advise us on the project. No official adviser is necessary, but it is nice to know that he's ready to help when we need it. He's worked on autonomous formation flying before dealing with IMU's, gas motors, and all that good stuff. He's even made gyro-stabilized camera platforms on blimps before, for fun.

In other news, I've personally ordered a GPS module recently; it should come in this week. It's a unit I bought personally to play with, but hopefully my selection will also be a sufficient one for the project. Even if it isn't, the experience to come from playing with it should be useful enough. I also received my shipment of four extra ATmega168 micro-controllers that work with the Arduino. Hopefully I'll have some cool parallel processes going for things such as input conditioning and data buffering pending query. Matt also stumbled upon the AeroSim blockset for Simulink which should help us rapidly prototype the controller. You can find more about it at http://www.u-dynamics.com/