December 26, 2006

Super Sylphide -- an Autopilot System for Small UAVs [English version]

(the last update is Apr. 2011.)

What's "Super Sylphide"?

"Super Sylphide" is a novel autopilot system for small UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) whose weight is defined as about one or two kilograms. These UAVs are developed actively especially in the aeronautics research field. This is because they have potential to achieve many practical tasks such as autonomous disaster monitoring, and they are so easy to handle that they do not require runway to take off.
However, small UAVs have not been capable of desirable autonomy and intelligence yet. In other words, what they can do now is only to take aerial photos along a pre-planned path, and they have to be helped by a human operator in many situations. This is mainly due to their strict limitaions on the payload weight, size and cost. Especially, it is a serious problem that navigation devices which are more accurate than a stand-alone GPS receiver, and powerful processors to run more robust but complicated algorithms than the classical PID are not installed. Therefore, the development of "Super Sylphide", whose features are to provide accurate navigation data with the INS/GPS integration, and DSP computing for large calculation capacity, is started. The detail is in the following brochure.

Related Resources in English

There are several outcomes in the cource of the development. The followings are the related articles which are written in English (the oldest is the top).

• "A Powerful Autopilot System for Small UAVs with Accurate INS/GPS Integrated Navigation", 2007 JSASS-KSAS Joint International Symposium on Aerospace Engineering, Kitakyushu, JAPAN, 2007, Paper 005
• "High performance navigation system with integration of low precision MEMS INS and general-purpose GPS", Transactions of the Japan Society for Aeronautical and Space Sciences, pp.284-292, Vol.50, No.170, 2007.
• ICAS 2008, Alaska, Paper ID is 483.
  
• 2009 GCOE Workshop, Super Sylphide can be used as the avionics for the system identification of small UAVs.
  
• "System Identification of Small UAVs with MEMS- Based Avionics", AIAA-2009-1907, AIAA Infotech 2009.

Progress reports

Short progress reports with images, and circuit shematic are available in this site. They are originally in Japanese, but you can get machine translation versions when the right upper button "English" is clicked. The following is the list (the latest is the top).

• Debuging Tiny Feather with low-cost JTAG emulator
• Production model of Super Sylphide
• Compact Super Sylphide = Tiny Feather, DSP borad, IMU and Servo I/F, and Air Data Sensor
• New board with Hi-maneuver sensors
• Flight Expreiment and a movie of Dutch Roll
• Solution of communication problem between C8051 and DSP via SPI with McBSP and EDMA
• History to completion of developement of the navigation routine which runs on a DSP
• Inside the experimental R/C airplane
• Idea of still camera module
• Experiments with R/C airplane
• I2C implementation for FPGA
• I/O expansion with FPGA
• I hate Windows because a USB composite device is not recoginized correctly
• Cooperation between CPU interrupt and EDMA functions in the transmittion via McBSP
• Maintain time stamps in case of GPS outages
• Bake a ROM for the DSP board
• Matrix algebra libraly for C6713 DSP (revised version)
• How to transmit / receive multi-words packets with McBSP
• communication via SPI with DSP/BIOS provided by TI
• Calibration of pressure sensors
• Annoying cables
• DSP PCB schematic and layout
• Debugging with the DSP IDE
• Connection to R/C servo actuators
• About opensource C compiler -- sdcc
• A sense of debugging

The derivation of the name "Super Sylphide"

The name "Super Sylphide" is derived from the seriese name of aircrafts which stars in my favorite Japanese scientific novel "Sentō Yōsei Yukikaze" written by Kanbayashi Chōhei. The novel is made into anime, and probally available in English.

Any comments?

If you have any questions or comments, please send me an E-mail (the address is the right lower one) with the keyword "Sylphide" included into the title.