UAVs, POV flying, etc.

I haven't had much time lately to work on my camera on a helicopter project...but I have seen some interesting sites and ideas on the web.

First I have been following the Penn State and UC Berkley autonomous projects. Now the Berkley folks have mounted a Kinectec device on their quad copter and got it to follow a path while avoiding obstacles.



For comparison, here is Penn State's Quad.





The common thread is they are using an Ascending Technologies (AscTec) Pelican Quadrotor. They don't list a price, but for comparison, their hobby Quad RC is $1000...I would expect at least double for the Pelican.

The other common thread is they are using ROS, a Robot Operating System, open source, at the ROS.ORG site.

And while I was looking up those links from the ROS.ORG website, I found a nice page at the CCNY Robotics Lab.

The CCNY site has a nice wiki on the AscTec Quads.

Here is the CCNY Quad in action.



Finally, while randomly sifting through this I found a small website with good info for POV flying. RC Explorer

Here is how I found the RC Explorer site...