Hey all
Here is a video from my final year project doing mechanical engineering at the university of Adelaide in Australia. A group of 4 students with mechanical, aerospace, mechatronic and computer science backgrounds worked on improving this aircraft from a similar project in 2007. Although paparazzi in the end wasn't integrated into the final aircraft due to a few technical issues and strong winds preventing flight we still intend to complete the system with paparazzi on board over the summer.
We were able to impress the judges at a recent exhibition that we attended by using paparazzi and flightgear to simulate our complete system, so much so that we
managed to pull a prize which was pretty cool. We used an array of computers all linked over a network to simulate a complete flight including full integration of image processing for target detection! This was done by setting up a camera in flightgear that aimed straight down from the aircraft just like on the real aircraft and then pumping that out via s-video to a capture card on the image processing computer. Small dummy people were added to the scenery of flightgear so that the image processing had something to find. Once everything was up and running our image processing software was able to pick out the target, send the position to paparazzi over the ivy bus then instruct the aircraft to loiter over the target for confirmation by the ground operator. The ground operator from there has to confirm or reject the target with paparazzi being told the correct action depending on the answer.
Unfortunately I don't
have any video of the entire system working but it was pretty cool. Nothing like Martin and Antoine's live presentation though!!!
anyway that's enough of my ramble.
Todd