News:

FlyingFish successful autonomous UAV for persistent-ocean-surveillance, funding approved for continued development

The Flying Fish autonomous seaplane UAV is believed to be the first aircraft to self-initiate and autonomously fly from takeoff through landing in open water. Successful DARPA proof-of-concept demonstrations included over twenty fully autonomous, self-initiated flight sequencies to demonstrate station keeping capabilities. Extension of FlyingFish funding into 2008/09 will see the complete implementation of a solar-recharge capability and more robust hardware, flight management (software), and flight control systems.

FlyingFish: Autonomous Persistent-Ocean-Surveillance

In Collaboration With: Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering: Marine Hydro-Dynamics Laboratory
Sponsored By: DARPA

Overview: The FlyingFish autonomous seaplane was designed and constructed by a joint team of aerospace and marine hydro-dynamics researchers at the University of Michigan over a period of eight months starting in March 2007. The "Fish" successfully completed Monterey Bay sea-trials in late October 2007, autonomously conducting a series of takeoff - through - landing flight segments on the open water. Designed for "persistent station-keeping" despite winds and currents, the surveillance system monitors aircraft position relative to a desired "watch" region and automatically initiates flights to reposition the craft as needed.

MichiganMan: Intelligent Human-Robot Collaboration

Overview: Understanding proximal human-robot collaboration requires both theoretical and experimental development and evaluation. A first-generation .safe. manipulator has been designed, constructed, and preliminarily evaluated primarily during standalone operation. This manipulator is a 4 degree-of-freedom (4DOF) revolute arm in a roll-pitch-roll-pitch configuration, enabling 3DOF tip positioning with redundancy but without a wrist to orient an end effector. Currently, forward kinematics software computes tip motion sequences, and a simple text-user-interface exists for lower-level open-loop joint control. Multithreaded programs control the arm with inverse kinematics (converting Cartesian waypoints to joint-angle commands) path planning used to generate tip waypoints. Environment perception is accomplished through a pair of firewire cameras and a real-time computer vision package, with work in progress to implement and verify human collaborator (arm) pose estimation.

TableSat: Satellite Simulation, Flexible Educational Tool

Sponsored By: NSF & NASA

Overview: The University of Michigan's TableSat platform is a one degree-of-freedom "Tabletop" satellite that emulates the dynamics, sensing, and actuation capabilities required for spacecraft attitude control. TableSat is driven by two .computer fan. thrusters commanding clockwise and counter-clockwise torques, respectively, and experiences extremely low friction on its central pivot point. TableSat contains a high-precision rate gyro to measure angular velocity along with a three-axis magnetometer and set of four core sun sensors (CSS) to measure pointing direction. An onboard Diamond Systems Prometheus PC/104 computer running the QNX real-time operating system communicates to a ground station via a wireless 802.11b interface. The computer interfaces to sensors through 16-bit analog-to-digital converters and to actuators through amplified 16-bit digital-to-analog channels.