On Thu, 07 Jan 2016 14:14:46 -0800, kirk.stant wrote:

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Sec...16/01/06/Navy-
tests-cooperative-soaring-for-UAV-sailplanes/4961452104725/?spt=sec&or=bn

Good luck getting this genie back in the bottle!

Actually, its been quite slow escaping from its bottle.

As far as I can tell the origins were with the ALOFT project, the subject
a PhD thesis completed in 2010 by Daniel J Edwards. The project was to
develop an autonomous soaring autopilot for a 5m span carbon RC
sailplane. It was successful and was even allowed to compete against
human pilots in an RC XC competition in 2008: these events fly what I
know as racing tasks (I think you call them AT tasks), typically round
triangular courses of up to 100 km or so with the pilots riding in
convertibles or on the back of pickups. The ALOFT system was hand-flown
for launch and landing and, won one day (100km triangle, in autonomous
mode for, IIRC, 98% of the flight.

Up to the XC competition there was quite a bit of information about ALOFT
on the web, mainly in model flying websites and the ALOFT project site.
Oddly enough, after Dan Edwards got his PhD, virtually everything about
the project vanished from the 'net, though careful searching can still
find copies of his thesis.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |