Fully autonomous landing at sunset (with flight director and augmented reality flight path overlay.)
Fully autonomous landing at sunset (with flight director and augmented reality flight path overlay.)
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Very slick. I haven’t toyed with this stuff in about 5 years, but it looks like things have come a long way since my circa-2013 Eagle Tree. 
What gear/osd is this?
Thanks for the kind words, this is the AuraUAS system running on beaglebone-based hardware. The OSD is added in post processing right now using python+opencv – so I can draw it at full res and full frame rates. It is a completely independent ecosystem I’ve been developing and carrying with me through a couple different jobs since the mid-2000’s. I use it to validate our EKF performance and flight controller performance. I draw in things like the sun & moon because I can and it also helps me see if the aircraft’s orientation estimate is actually lining up with the real world. I know the rest of the world is doing multi-rotor on pixhawk hardware, but I like airplanes (a LOT!) and enjoy developing the hardware and software and algorithms on my own.
Very very impressive. Do you have a website that one can follow your developement ?
@clolsonus Likewise, I found I preferred the more graceful experience of flying fixed-wing. I have too many hobbies right now, but someday I’ll get back into RC and look into your project. I’m an embedded developer, so putting a BeagleBone into the plane seems quite natural.
Hi John, the main center of AuraUAS development is github: https://github.com/AuraUAS
This isn’t a very exciting site to poke around though, but it does have reference hardware designs, firmware, flightcode, gcs, and pretty much all the necessary bits to put a system together. You could check out my blog which gets updated once in a while: http://gallinazo.flightgear.org/ and my youtube channel (I’m not a fancy youtube content creator, but I post some things once in a while): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwzx9ASLy_O3Zm5So6ARZjw
Thanks for finding aspects of this project cool and interesting!
Hi Casey, I marry a beaglebone and a teensy together for my flight controller. The teensy handles all the hard real time tasks, sensor IO, RC servos, etc. (Don’t ask about the PRU’s … too complicated for me to figure out) Then with the teensy doing the lowlevel stuff, the beaglebone is freed up to run the EKF, flight control, navigation, mission, high level logic stuff, logging, and communication. My core flight code on the beaglebone is a hybrid application of C++ and embedded python that share the work load. I really like this approach because it lets me prototype and flighttest new ideas directly in python, and usually that is fast enough (I run comfortably at 100hz.) I’m having fun (at least on the days where everything works like it should.)