High Altitude Glider

Hi all, 

This is my 1st post here so please bear with me if I'm posting in the wrong board etc!

I'm heavily involved in High Altitude Ballooning which is sending payloads up into near space using a weather balloon with various tech equipment on. A project that I'm exploring currently is the possibility of an autonomous glider that will fly the payload back to a predesignated location once the balloon has burst - for easy retrieval.

I am aware of similar projects and have looked at the posts on this forum and others. I'm currently working with a great guy over at flyingwings.co.uk who is custom building me a flying wing that will be able to house all the payload equipment etc. This is in addition to a glider that I'm building myself out of styrofoam. 

For stabilisation/autopilot I'm looking to use ArduPilot. I have a couple of questions though:

Will the pilot work with a flying wing? 

Will the pilot work with any old plane (that I'm making!) i.e. not inherently stable?

Currently I have a lassen iQ gps module that I use, will this integrate easily with ArduPilot?

Finally (phew) - if I was to go with a separate stabilisation unit so the glider/flying wing fly stable, would that eliminate the need for the IMU 'oil pan' expansion board? As all I would require is a 'return to home' feature.

Sorry about all the questions, I'm very new to aeronautics stuff.

Thanks!

Tags: altitude, glider, high

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Permalink Reply by Larry Grater on January 18, 2012 at 8:01am
I had another comment after rereading one of Cuddy's posts. Some GPS recievers are pretty tolerant to angle and rate excursions, even with antenna patterns like from the ceramic patch. I've seen good performance with Mediatek during aerobatics. I think this is fairly easy to test. I'm tempted to spin down, get data, spin down invedted, get data. Airframe is still down for mods for high altitude but i'm tempted to test on my 3-d a/f since the venus gps has a logger.
Permalink Reply by Cuddy on January 18, 2012 at 11:19am

Sounds a good idea - lots of good work going on from all different angles!

I've spoke with people about the idea of a wiki and we should be able to set up a subsection on the UKHAS wiki www.ukhas.org.uk where we can detail bits and pieces to help each other out. 

It's a big task but I certainly think we can do it!


ModeratorPermalink Reply by Monroe on February 7, 2012 at 6:58pm

Hey guy's I started a group here Team Prometheus and I'd like to get a wiki going too! I'm all for everybody working together and sharing what we can all do.

I wonder if we could get something going here on DIY Drones? With a wiki for High Altitude Balloons and the APM Arduloon? :)

Monroe

Permalink Reply by Salame le Vrai on February 15, 2012 at 2:14pm

Hi all,

I see there is a growing community growing for HAB and high altitude flights ! I'm impressed ! 

I am also working on a similar project but with a greater empasis on the quality of the videos taken from that altitude. 

I plan tu use ardupilot as a gyroscope to stabilize my gopro, keep a steady heading thanks to a 360 servo acting that will counterbalance tork, and working also on an uplink communciation between ground station and the balloon, in order to issue commandes to rotate the orientation of the camera at will. In next steps, my goal is to receive pictures (at first), and then videos live from the balloon. I plan on working with people having their HAM licence in order to stay within regulation. 

I'd be glad to participate in any of the discussions you have started here. I guess we all have the same problems (GPS, airframe drop within low air density, ardupilot in empty space, ...)

My blog : http://sokapiwi.blogspot.com where I try to reference all of my thoughts and whereabouts...

Since the last post, has there been an attempt to sum up the questions, work going on etc.. ? 

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