SpaceFish logo, help us to choose one!

We want to show you some candidate logos for the SpaceFish crew.

Carlos, an Héctor’s friend, is working creating some decorative stuff for all our avionics, the SpaceFish itself and some awesome shirts! We just have started to create them, feel free to comment them and chose your favorite logo way!
We check out the web statistics every day and we know you are there! so, don’t hesitate to publish your opinion and suggestions!

More SpaceFish propaganda

Hot off the press we bring you some more SpaceFish propaganda, without any specific order: attitude estimation using the algorithm Héctor presented at the DLR (without any filtering yet), ground station gadgets and mission data visualization.

We are able to retrieve information saved in logs from missions and process it as needed. In this particular case we processed the GPS log and converted it to Google’s KML. This is how the ship mission looks like when exported to Google Earth:

As you can see there’s a sistematic error of 10 meter on the altitude. Fortunately, Frank gave us a very good idea to mitigate this error using a local GPS in the ground station. The next mission will probably include this correction.

The next video shows the current state of our monitoring and data gathering software. It also shows how well the algorithm for attitude estimation works (it’ll be much better when we add Kalman filtering):

Without trying to be exhaustive these are the near-future actions:

• Decide upon a company to manufacture the moulds (we have three candidates already, but nothing is set in stone)
• Add the safety microcontroller and keepalive signals.
• Translate the Kalman filter to C (it is already implemented and tested in matlab)
• Organize GUI components and widgets
• First gliding flights for data gathering
• Finish translating our SED to LaTeX because we all hate Word. This will also help improving the quality of our documentation given the fact that it is much easier to collaborate now.
• Try to get a reasonable model for X-Plane to do a hardware-in-the-loop

We’ll keep you posted when we hit more milestones or have news.

We hope everything goes perfect for those flying their experiments in October! Good Luck!

- fpereda

SpaceFish breaking news.

We have kept this site without update for a long time… this is not so good, because now we have to summarize all the news in a single post .

First of all, we want to announce that our project has been delayed. We are doing well in our schedule, but unfortunately many extra tests have to be done to perform a perfect flight in Kiruna and resolving all kind of safety issues, as well the SpaceFish ship has been redesigned too.

The new SpaceFish model

The new SpaceFish is larger and can achieve more stability at high velocities, we are not going to use any kind of motor in Kiruna, it will be a pure glider version without air in-takes.

Now we have to build new molds, we selected one company from Poland. Kamil is ready in Warsaw to supervise this job.

Kamil supervising some aircraft molds during his studentship this summer.

We presented this issues to the experts board at the end of July at DLR, they were very comprehensive and let us the opportunity of keep working with the next RexusBexus experiment in 2010, under the condition of keep the good job under a strict (and now realistic) schedule.

Now focusing inside the SpaceFish project, the first flying autopilot candidate did his first test-field outside the laboratory successfully! We tested it on board of a “little” minesweeper. This ship is part of a Fernando’s project and David and Héctor wanted to help him taking all kind of telemetry with the autopilot. We applied all the ideas that we presented to the experts the last July and we got an amazing results, with stable measures (less than 1º without any kind of filter! we are really waiting to see what will do our Kalman filter!), a noiseless radio-link, a really cool software in the ground station (we will do a specific new for this chapter), a mechanical robust design and also a good behavior with different temperatures.

Héctor and David with the telemetry system

Here there is a video of the “minesweeper” maneuvers.

The next step is taking the autopilot to a real glider and start to take inputs and outputs to do models and other control stuff in the next days.