National Geographic and UCSD have teamed up to create broad range of robotic vehicles for exploration from the ground, sky and sea. We meet up with Dr. Kastner's lab to see the multiple rotor copters that they working on. Tom is the main PHD student working on this part of the project. Tom has been flying helicopters since he was a young kid and has a very good understanding on what it takes to keep something up in the air without crashing. Tom showed us several different copters that he has worked on for the project. One thing that I have to say is that UCSD has a lot more funding than UCR. One of the newest copters that Tom was working on was a octocopter and was planned to be fitted with 8 lipo's and a DSLR rig big enough to hold an Red Epic or similar camera.
All of the copters that Tom has worked with were built and balanced from the factory. Having a frame built and test from the manufacture themselves gives him a major advantage in getting his project off the ground. One of the things that he had warned us about was having to constantly tweak the control systems yourself. This can be a big time hog and set the project further back than expected.
Not only does Tom work on the control systems of the copters, but also on the wireless systems so that data can be sent and received by the vehicle. The capability of sending HD video is a major problem within all wireless applications. Tom has worked up some code that has solved part of this problem. He takes the digital code and compresses it on a ARM 9 processor then sends that data down to a ground computer where it is decompressed and viewed.
So where do we fit in all of this? We were able to ask a team with a lot more experience in these kind of endeavors what the challenges that we might expect and some of the approaches to overcome them. The UCSD team thought that we were going to have lots of problems trying to be able to complete our task in such little time with so many different aspects of the project on the table. Another thing that we have not put lots of thought into was how we were going to autonomously take off and land. Solutions include landing on an elevated object that will not cause ground air problems or using a laser/sonar ground distance sensor. Obviously one of these solutions cost much more than the other solution. Lastly we talked about the feasibility of completing the project and ways to take shortcuts so that we don't have to deal with mechanical problems.
