Aerial Robots?

[JesseK]

Having built my own quad (using the 3DRobotics kit and soldering the boards myself) I can say that I seriously doubt we'll see quadrotors as an official game object in FRC.

It may be feasible to attempt a tethered tri-rotor or quadrotor as an extension of the main bot, but typically the extension rules (e.g. 84" total cyllinder, 14" outside 1 bumper, etc) would cause more effort to be put into active tether management, further complicating overall robot design.

Quads also have an inherent safety risk. If a motor shaft is bent by even less than half a degree, the corresponding propeller will eventually fatigue and shatter, with shards of plastic/fiberglass going in all directions. Thus not only would inspectors need to see balanced props and vibration-free shafts, they'd probably also want a shroud around the propeller region -- adding weight that reduces the effectiveness of having a quadrotor to begin with.

Finally, quads (even the micro-motor quads) can use a TON of battery juice just hovering while carrying a load. My fully-loaded quad could hover in my basement for just 5 minutes using a 30C 3500mAh 3-cell LiPo -- and that's with >90% efficient outboard brushless motors. The FRC battery and motors are much less efficient, so we would need a very ideal game piece & scenario for quads to be of much use.

If you want to get into quadrotors as a hobby, save your pennies and buy a real quadrotor, not that parrot crap. http://www.diydrones.com
Get the $99 900Mhz telemetry kit and you'll be able to fly it using your laptop, FRC-style. All-told, including batteries, charger, telemetry, quad rotor kit, some spare motors/props, and some extra tooling I'd say I've spent roughly $750 for something programmable and customizable to suit what I want to do. The bucket list includes some autonomous maneuvers that the Parrot couldn't dream of doing, and also some custom controls for flight since I don't like their joystick interface.

[Deetman]

Safety is the one reason that anything like this is unlikely in a FIRST competition. While the actual competition environment can be controlled to mitigate risks, team labs cannot. My senior design project in college was a completely custom designed quadrotor back before they were popular and commercialized. Despite our tightly controlled testing environment including being tethered both vertically and horizontally, I very nearly took off the tip of one of my fingers. Those blades spin FAST. My finger got caught in one and the blade sliced through my skin and fingernail like it was paper. Thankfully it healed well without any ill effects, but imagine an out of control quad going right for any part of your body...

[xitaqua]

MSOE and UW-Platt plans to have a friendlly quad-copter competition this weekend. Does anyone knows of other universities having a competition ?

I plan also to share information on with the students on a project I am working on building a ground robot that can house a quadcopter and deploy on the field to locate a wiFi source and hover on top of it for 30 seconds.

The ground robot was prototypedusing cardboard by a 13 year old boy in Mississippi that got inspired by Caine's Arcade: http://www.cainesarcade.com/

Cheers,
Marcos.
BERAD (Broad Engagement Robotics Aerial Demo) Project Leader.