Cinestar 3-Axis Gimbal (Snow): Watch this in HD, with huge speakers. Now. It's impossible to explain in words how amazing it is. This is the Cinestar 8 with a 3DOF camera mount.
A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors: This was viral, so you may have seen it already. The Aggressive Maneuvers group from UPenn's GRASP Lab has released their newest video, which is near and dear to my heart because it uses nano quadrotors.
Nanocopter: Based on the OpenPilot platform, this one of the smallest quadrotors ever made. It's way smaller than 4pcb (2/3 the size and 40% the weight). The challenge is also issued for anyone to make a picocopter with 2" props.
Tricopter: A tricopter is an interesting controls problem, because it requires at least one servo to give it independent yaw control. This one is particularly light and stable, and has gone through many iterations to get better and better.
Tricopter: A tricopter is an interesting controls problem, because it requires at least one servo to give it independent yaw control. This one is particularly light and stable, and has gone through many iterations to get better and better.
Tinycopter: Kinda like a a 5/4-scale 4pcb. Except it uses standard off-the-shelf components so you could build one without the need for a custom circuit board and surface mount soldering skills. Speaking of Tinycopter, I got a chance to do battle against the original Tinycopter:
The thing I learned is that there really isn't a winning strategy in Battle Quadrotors. Anyway, the miniature and nano-scale quadrotors tend to be very robust, so neither suffered major damage. Which got us thinking: what would it take to kill a miniature quadrotor?
Oh...that'd do it. The Tesla coil, built by Daniel K., emits enough EMI-inducing field to mess with sensors and possibly even radio control, but that's if it doesn't simply strike your airframe with an arc instead.
Sticking with the theme of destruction, there was a brief period of nice weather (nice = 45ยบ and not windy) where I was able to fly one of my new flying things, a Hacker Skyfighter from Ryan A. I have only ever flown a small, ultra-stable indoor plane, so this was going to be an interesting challenge.
It's a flying wing, and set up for aerobatics. So if it looks like I know what I'm doing, rest assured this plane cannot help but do loops, rolls, and various other stunts while I try frantically to point it upwind and fly it away from the running track and back to the baseball field where I started. But, I will practice more and one day be good enough to actually land it.
 |
| I'm sorry, Ryan. |
For now, though, back to multirotors. 4pcb has always been plagued by frame vibration issues, since it's made only from 0.063" FR4. I can see the props and motors wiggling when the frame hits resonance, and it certainly messes with the gyro readings and makes it more difficult to fly. Through a combination of mechanical and software measures, I've made the control mostly immune to these vibrations, but I thought it would be interesting to try to see the magnitude of the problem more directly.
To visualize the vibrations, I used a trick I've used before, strobe imaging. Ordinarily, you can set the strobe light to flash at the same speed as the rotating object and it will look stationary. But, you can also offset the strobe by a small amount in order to get a virtual slow-motion action shot. For example, if the props are spinning at 6000rpm (100Hz), setting the strobe to 101Hz will cause them to appear to spin (backwards) at 1Hz. Since the props create the forcing frequency that drives the frame, the vibrations should also be visible at 1Hz. Commence magic:
There are definitely at least two modes of vibration present. The first, which occurs at lower frequency, is a torsional mode where the arm twists. The second, a higher-frequency mode, is the arm bending up and down. The twisting mode looks more dramatic, and I would probably want to minimize its magnitude first to get the cleanest inertial measurements. I actually tried adding carbon fiber reinforcements:
This definitely stiffened up the frame, but it didn't actually fly better. For one, I've mostly solved the gyro noise problems already, so any gain achieved by reducing vibration will be marginal at this point. Additionally, the extra weight and airflow disruption from these supports may have been enough to push some of the motors closer to saturation, making the control feel softer. So I took them off.
In general, 4pcb's motors are running too close to the control limit (hover is just under 200 out of 250 on the throttle at full battery voltage). I replaced one motor that had bad bearings, and the motor I put in its place was weaker than the other three and saturated the control output all the time. After a day of troubleshooting, I swapped the motor yet again and now they are more well-matched. Still, when the battery begins to get low, one motor will saturate and cause it to feel very soft and drifty.
Unlike most of my project chains, v1.0 of this quadrotor has been very successful and I'm quite happy with the way it works now. But I'm looking forward to improving it a bit more and it's up to the point where I will need a new board revision to do so. The next version of the PCB quadrotor will have several improvements including:
- Lighter weight. Microcontroller and power wiring integrated onto the board.
- Higher voltage (11.1V instead of 7.4V). This will help with command saturation, giving more thrust margin for the 2000rpm/V motors, and keep the voltage away from the Toshiba chip's 7.0V minimum. To maintain the weight goal, it will have to be a lower capacity. But with a higher input voltage, the ESCs will draw less battery current, so flight time should be similar.
- Closed-loop velocity control. No more motor matching. The Toshiba chips have a tachometer output that can be used as feedback to control prop speed, instead of open-loop motor terminal voltage.
- It will also have provisions for altimetry and possibly a small camera mount.
There's also something interesting in the background of that video, and I posted a teaser a few posts ago:
I'll apparently be going directly from miniature quadrotor to giant freaking hexrotor without stopping in between. (Okay, there was this medium-small quadrotor I helped out with a while back.) But anyway, thanks to a donation from some very awesome people, I now have a Cinestar 6 frame, with motors. This is the six-rotor cousin of the Cinestar 8 from the snow video above. I am planning to use it as a development platform for custom ESCs in the near future. But for now I will be working with some people to get it flying with off-the-shelf hardware. Step one for me was a quick thrust test:
Yes, that is one of Cap Kart's old batteries being used as ballast while a 12" prop tugs on a spring scale. Note also the 80/20 bar blocking the hexrotor from doing a complete flip in the event of string breakage. The result was a thrust of about 2kg at max current with a 12x3.8SF prop. That's 10x the amount of peak thrust 4pcb puts out from all four of its props...
The frame + motors weighs 1.5kg. So even after adding in the props, ESCs, control board, and a reasonably-sized battery, it has enough thrust to carry some pretty epic payloads... I am both terrified and excited to see it flying.
Could the vibration be caused by static prop balance vs dynamic prop balance? Are the motors themselves balanced? The other effect I've heard of that could be happening is that the blades experience different flow as they go past the support arms. Can you see the blades flex as they rotate? Streamlining the arms may reduce vibration and increase thrust but its likely to be only a marginal change.
ReplyDeleteThe motors are definitely not balanced. Even with the props off, there is significant vibration. I would like to try dynamically balancing the motor+prop simultaneously.
DeleteGood point about the airflow past the support arms. The blades don't appear to flex. I forgot to post the picture, but I did try adding card stock wedges to each arm to guide the flow around the arms. They didn't seem to help or hurt. I think I've tuned out most of the noise problems by mounting the sensors on foam tape and heavily filtering them in software.
Have you considered making a local "sandwich" stiffened type PCB to stiffen up the arms. Two boards half as wide, using solder as a glue (reflow? Might need some vias for heat transfer with a soldering iron) You could use the copper to carry power out to the motors so that its not waste weight. Result- Disadvantages: reduced Polar moment of inertia although you probably have more a bend and twist action than pure twist. -Advantages: greatly increased bending moment, greatly reduced surface area for the propeller air pulses to act on and of course more PCB!
ReplyDeleteNever seen this anywhere else, but why not?
That's a good idea. I've thought about doing two boards to increase the stiffness, or using something that isn't a PCB to do the same. I think either solution would work well. I do like the idea of having it be a single PCB, though - almost like a kit. No additional assembly required.
ReplyDelete