News:

FlyingFish second generation flight vehicle completes initial flight testing!
The Flying Fish autonomous unmanned seaplane project has reached a new stage of development. The construction of an updated second generation vehicle adds a number of key features including solar energy harvesting and more advanced/powerful avionics. Flexible space-grade solar panels installed on the upper wing surface will allow the vehicle to self-charge during ocean deployments. Initial system testing has been completed through flight envelope exploration manuevers. The system is presently undergoing updates to the propulsion system in anticipation of the next round of flight testing.

Older News
- FlyingFish V2 Receives FAA Certificate of Authorization
- FlyingFish V2 High speed taxi testing complete
- Second generation FlyingFish avionics completed/tested
- FlyingFish Funded into 2008/09

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.