DIY Drones Podcast (AAC)

Richard Hanson, who works on the AMA's Regulatory and Governmental Affairs operations. The regulatory process to introduce UAVs in the National Airspace (NAS) is a long, tortured and potentially disastrous ordeal for us. If it goes well, we'll be given guidelines or laws under which to operate, which create a category for small amateur UAVs that allows us to operate safely and still do interesting work. If it doesn't go well, we could be banned entirely. http://www.ama-dist-8.org/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&p=414&sid=557ee006e7b24adccaf0279ad2232013 A couple blog posts discussed: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/open-source-hardware-draft http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/x-plane-integration

Doug Weibel and Jason Short run through the upcoming ArduPilot Mega software, including more advanced mission capabilities.

Doctoral candidate at Penn Daniel Mellinger published a video showing some of the most awesome maneuvers a quadrotor can do. We learn—in detail—how it works. Can you do it at home? We find out.

Sebastian Thrun takes us on a tour of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. You may know him as the guy who led Stanford's car to victory in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. We talk about autonomous cars, robotic muscles, stunt helicopters, aircraft that fly in formation to save fuel and using machine learning to build autonomous systems.

Wandering around the annual Maker Faire convention with over 600 DIY exhibits covering pretty much everything from clothing to RC battleships we found Ari Krupnik who's managed to figure out how to fly an RC helicopter (4 channels) not much more than an iPhone and a transmitter.

This episode is the second traveling podcast where Tim travels to MIT in Cambridge, MA to talk to Missy Cummings, professor and director of the Humans and Automation Lab (as well as one of the first female navy fighter pilots!).

We take you live to Doug Weibel's house on the eve of the SparkFun Electronics Autonomous Vehicle competition with a round table of both returning and new guests: Guests include (although a couple of them may not have spoken): Chris Anderson Bill Premerlani Ben Levitt Adam Barrow Tim Trueman Pete Hollands Earl Campbell Jordi Muñoz Ryan Beall And thanks to Doug Weibel for hosting the podcast in his home!

Nima Kayvan joins us from Brisbane, Australia to talk about his team's entry into the Australian Outback UAV Challenge.

Krzysztof Bosak joins us in the wee hours from Poland to talk IMU-based autopilots and aerial photography.

Nathan's addiction to microcontrollers brings peace and joy to thousands of people with the products, classes and tutorials in the seven years since he started SparkFun Electronics.

Find out what states you track in a 17 state extended kalman filter, what it takes to commercialize a UAV and what hardware object tracking involves.

Curtis explains some of the many uses of simulators including how a closed loop hardware-in-the-loop system works. Curtis' profile on DIY Drones: http://diydrones.com/profile/CurtOlson Flight Gear: http://www.flightgear.org/ Airframe modeling webpage mentioned during the show: http://jsbsim.sourceforge.net/aeromatic.html

David Ankers and Angus Peart launch OpenPilot: an IMU-based autopilot initially aimed at quadcopters: http://openpilot.org/

Check out Tom's open source autopilot at http://gluonpilot.com/ One of the questions from the audience references this photo set of testing ArduPilot 2.5 code: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ttrueman/sets/72157623199524559/show/

Henri Seydoux, CEO of Parrot tells us about his vision to making gaming become reality with the AR.Drone.

Chad Frost shares stories from NASA's autonomous systems and robotics department and his thoughts on civilian usage of UAVs.

Abe Bachrach, a graduate student at MIT answers our questions on LIDAR-equipped quadcopters.

We're back after two weeks off with Jason Short, discussing the ArduPilot 2.5 software.

Steve Morris of MLB joins us to talk about his VTOL UAV, ITAR export regulations and the nuisances of being in the UAV business.

Patrick Egan attempts to guide us through the legal waters surrounding UAVs.

The VectorNav team talks to us about starting a business and IMUs.

Guest Gary Mortimer wakes up early to join us for stories of octocopters, Africa and hot air balloon piloting.

Guest Dean Goedde talks to us about doing international business, working fulltime on AttoPilot and dives into some technical goodies.

Guest Bill Premerlani talks about the origins, present state and future directions of the UAV dev board.

Guest Ryan Beall talks about an IMU-based autopilot he built at the Naval Academy.

The altitude record attempt was for an autonomously controlled electrically powered UAV weighing less than 5kg, FAI Category U.2a Group 2.

Even more IMU talk followed by a discussion of our favorite posts from the week.

IMU mentioned: http://www.sensordynamics.cc/cms/cms.php?pageId=73

Episode 0: "Houston, we've got a problem"" Show Notes Photos of the NASA Ames field trip from several people: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/nasa-ames-excursion ArduPilot + OSD: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1102975 ArduPilot IMU boards: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9372 http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9373 Magnetometer tilt-compensation algorithms: http://www.magneticsensors.com/datasheets/sae.pdf