Ryerson: Flying Sunday, April 9

[Frank v B]

Ryerson has just confirmed we will meet at the field at about noon tomorrow (Sunday). 

This year's competition is a very complicated quad copter project involving GPS, autonomous flight, facial recognition, photo stitching aerial maps and Sully's favourite: Canada Geese.

As per last week, their flights are short and will be woven into the day's flight pattern.  Thanking you in advance for your co-operation.

a copy of the post describing this year's project:

Project description.

A remotely piloted vehicle must fly over a field littered with mock Canada goose nests.  Some are empty, some have sitting pairs but only one will have a clutch of eggs.
The RPV must fly over the entire field and photo map it with an onboard camera.  The data is sent to the base station where it is photo-stitched into one photographic topographical map.  The nests must be identified as one of 4 species of goose via adapted facial recognition software.  Each nest will be GPS tagged for longitude and latitude.
The RPV must then be sent to the one nest containing the eggs, land on the nest and grab one egg and return it in one piece to the base station.  Oh, yes, all this with autonomous flight using the GPS nest locations identified earlier.
The base station has a tracking antenna to receive all the data and photographs.  It automatically tracks the Quad wherever it goes at whatever height.

Frank

[Frank v B]

Success.  The Ryerson crew scattered about 6 eggs across the runway and cut field.  I saw them successfully pick one up.  The first tries were a little shaky.  The first one they tried to pick up kept getting blown down the runway by their own prop wash.  The second attempt caused the quad to flip and break a prop.  The next attempt was successful and they picked up the egg but the quad flipped again on the way back to the taxiway.... and another single bladed prop was added to their collection.
Just to make Ryerson feel comfortable, Simon flipped his FPV quad as well.  The MudMonkeys (Simon and Graham) retrieved it from the muddy field.

A great day.

Frank