Next phase in producing the moulds and few words about VKI

Next phase of manufacturing the moulds for Spacefish is done!
In this moment in Warsaw we have ready both – top and bottom – parts of positive form, and now we are ready to start manufacturing final moulds.

Milling

Top part is ready!

And now we can start manufacturing final moulds...

As you remember we have a new sponsor – Von Karman Institute. Probably from the beginnig of the March I will start my internship in VKI, application form is mostly filled and almost ready to send.
My job to do will be to determine coefficients – drag, lift, moments, depending on different positions of the rudders. In general we want to do analysis using CFD methods.

New PCBs for ships!

Just a quick note, today is a busy day here (ties parade as we call it) but we should post this anyway. We just received the new PCBs for our experiments with small ships. If you take a closer look you’ll see the project’s logo. Apologies for the iPhone camera, but that’s the best we have right now.

The main components have been laid out (that is, not soldered yet) to give an idea of how they’ll look like.

Cheers.

First news directly from Poland! Moulds, promotion…

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are pleased to inform you that first element of mould is ready!

The bottom part of the form for Spacefish was finished few days ago. That means now we can manufacture the final bottom mould – negative form, in which our airplanes will be made.

Bottom positive form

A little bit better

Ready to use!

Isn't it beautiful???

The next step is to manufacture two symmetrical elements of the top part (firstly it will be also positive form) and after that the final negative mould.

Then SpaceFish Team will be ready to start manufacturing family of SpaceFishes and to conduct flight tests!

During last few weeks SpaceFish Project and REXUS/BEXUS Campaign were presented in Poland many times. The most interesting were 2 interviews in a public radio and a dedicated presentation at Warsaw University of Technology.

Here you can find records of one interview – in Polish.

Interview in Radio Kampus – Part 1

Interview in Radio Kampus – Part 2

Kamil during the presentation at Warsaw University of Technology

Artfish

At the same time we gather data from real flights we are also starting to give shape to our path planning algorithms and utilities. We currently have a path plan (as shown in a picture a couple of weeks ago) and also some ‘art’ regarding our utilities.

Artfish (click for a larger version)

There’s a bit more than what it is shown. We can select a different number of waypoints and position them at arbitrary locations. And there’s more coming.

Real flight telemetry test

We’ve worked quite hard during the last weeks preparing telemetry tests in real RC planes. Last saturday, Héctor went with some local RC experts to gather real data. We have some very nice logs from those flights.

Doing real experiments is important because some “minor” problems that never show up in the laboratory arise during the experiment phase.

We are finishing the details of our trip to Noordwijk tomorrow so we’ll just give you a little bit of what we got:

And this is the path the plane took:

See you soon!

We have a plan!

Today we want to show you our flight plan, to illustrate what we expect from our Space-Fish.

Space-Fish flight plan

In this picture, the Space-Fish flight from Bexus begins at 15Km of altitude, foreseeing to the East from the landing area (marked with an A in the map). The first duty is to face the landing area and get into a circumference of 3Km of diameter, with its centre at the A point. Once within the circumference, we start to do several “eights” until we reach the altitude to start landing at the HAC point. In the HAC point we will descent linearly, like a cylinder. Finally, facing the A point, straight on to the final movement, the landing.

It’s easy isn’t it? In our simulations it is, we will face the reality on next October, and we hope it will be successfully!

We thought to perform a low altitude flight over ESRANGE, printing our names with smoke in the sky, but… well, they have not allowed us to do it .

Here, a picture of the landing area from Olle Persson, you can check it out at Latitude 67º53’16”N and Longitude 21º05’06”.

Space-Fish landing area

Another milestone comes

Great news from the Space-Fish team!

Kamil is following the building of the new Space-Fish molds closely. They are being manufactured at NB Composites, located  at Warsaw, and we are hoping to have the molds in Madrid by the end of November.

That means the Space-Fish will become a reality soon.

Space-Fish CAD model

Along with the molds, we are also proud to announce that a new important sponsor is coming. We are currently talking with the Von Karman Institute to take the Space-Fish into their wind tunnel. That will allow us to characterize an accurate model, allowing us to perform better simulations and control algorithms.

We also want to announce that the new documentation version is ready, (unbelievable!, one day before the death-line!). We looked back to our first version which we delivered to ESA… and we have to say that the documentation has evolved amazingly in the rigth way, we hope to do easier the review by the experts with this new document version, so the feedback will be clearer doing easier the project progress.

Space-Fish documentation

You will realize that the Space-Fish logo chosen wasn’t the most voted one… well… after all…this is a Spanish democracy.

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.