software and hardware cycle

An adaptation of what is expected of me. What I and Dr. Prita ma'am expects of me. To implement this cycle-

This is what we are supposed to do.

This is what I understood from the three videos of Cyril Stachniss

 

 

28th November 2013

http://anduinocopter.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/motors-machining-and-the-sil/.
On a cursory glance, these people use USB transfer of data between the ARDUINO and the ANDROID devices.

25th November 2-13

The actual plan is that I start working real. I start working really from the 6th to the 21st of this month. I should actually plan this well. Everything that I experience today is the result of things that I have done in the past. I am valuable. I have complete faith and trust in anything that I put my mind to . All of my needs are met. I am able to give up blaming because it is a waste of energy. What are the things that have to be done? I ask all my friends to post what has to be done. Accountability is responsibility.
1. See that the AT91SAM7S kit works.
2. See that the other kit works.
3. Make the motion model.
4. Write the motion model in C.
5. Write a kalman filter, an implementation of the bayes filter, with the motion model in C.
6. Learn to simulate the pentacopter control in MATLAB. i.e. learn to use S.I.L.
7. Learn to simulate the pentacopter control in N.I.Labview. i.e. learn to use S.I.L. again!! create penta model
8. Study how cool dude krish makes the stuff work on the ATOM kit from intech.
http://sal.aalto.fi/publications/pdf-files/eluu11.pdf an interesting kinematic model for a quadcopter as mentioned inhttp://aeroquad.com/showthread.php?4927-Mathematical-Model-of-a-Quad-Copter
http://andrew.gibiansky.com/blog/physics/quadcopter-dynamics/ Mr. Gibiansky's blog is outstanding.
 I would love to make a website for myself like Mr. Gibiansky. That is a long term goal or can it be short term?

Whirlwind boss

It's been a whirlwind, these past few days. Anyway, this is what I've learnt. There is this really cool course by Cyril Stachniss, on youtube. I thank god that Cyril was created on earth. He is a god himself. He has uploaded the coolest 'real' course on SLAM. Can you believe it? on SLAM. That's just the title of the course. And, this is what I've gathered. The Kalman filter is a version of the Bayes filter, which relies on the Markov assumption(it makes so much more sense on video), and uses Gaussian functions for parameters. We need a sensor model which serves as our corrector part of the bayes equation. We need a motion model that fits into the predictor part of our kalman filter. The motion model itself consists of two parts- the kinematic model which consists of speed and velocities and the dynamical model which deals with the forces and torques.
http://www.intechopen.com/books/motion-control/intelligent-flight-control-of-an-autonomous-quadrotor
The following link gives us an idea of the motion modeling for a quadcopter, should have no trouble executing whatever it requires and says as my first glance of the material says that we just need some 'scale'ing of the weight and the lengths, get the inertial matrix then, it looks like everything goes smoothly from there. I guess. I will go to college tomorrow and check abt the AT91SAM7S? That's really a question I have to ask myself. I'll be forsaking a whole day that I can possibly have to myself. But, longterm, I really want to do this.
Right now, have listened to a dialogue from a tamil film in the back ground, while I'm watching Cyril Stachniss's third video that introduces the idea of motion modeling, Bayes filter etc.. It goes like this.
There's an old, respectable dude wearing headphones who says out loud, that women enter 'his' mall to get beauty tips from 'his son'. AAAAARRRRRRRRRRGHHHHH#*&(*%#*(*#&(%*&(#! That's really got something off my mind now. Ok. Focus. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Shan's place

 Today was a really cool day. Prasanna and I studied our way which consisted of blasting through this really weird local author textbook. It wasn’t great. In fact, it really didn’t make sense. A couple of things that I decided on thanks to Shan and co were this.On the thirteenth of this month, I will go to UNIQ technologies and ask them about the training . After that, I will go to Impel consultancy and get the job done by the thirtieth of this month.I started using the local author after the guys talked about how Theodore S. Rappaport’s textbook was condensed by the local author. This really didn’t make sense. I liked Andreas Molisch’s work because it read like a story. Things there made sense. Thankfully, my stupidity gave way to something right. I now am using the local author. I completed half of the second unit and the third unit, apart from a bit of the fourth unit  properly. I am a little disoriented.I went there at 10 O’ Clock in the morning to Shanmugam’s house. I forgot to phone and found myself phoning him at the doorstep. Awkward. Thankfully, the cool guy that Shan is, is so amazing and cool and helpful. He allowed me inside and we looked around sops for some time. After some time, he phoned Vaishnavi and Sabareesh and talked to them about how they were writing these exams. Then, I realized that Molisch though light years more readable was not the way to go if I wanted to pass these exams. Today was a great day. Today was a great day. Today was the first great day in a very long time. However amped up I was, I ended up sleeping by 9:00 at night and waking up at 7:00 this morning. Everyone is worked up about the examinations. That is understandable. Well, now is the time to really work things out and really well at that. I plan to start by 9:40 today and not eat until I finish the units 4 and 5 thoroughly by 5:00 today. I have a limit, so I know that this is my goal for sure. Then I want to write and practice the whole of the 2nd unit by tomorrow morning at 4:00.

 

Have started studying for my wireless communications examination. It is like the coolest subject ever. I just hope that I get some decent scores 'cos I've been studying like from the beginning of these hols from a foreign author- Dr. Andreas Molisch. Love the way he's written it. It makes sense. I'm starting with the fourth unit completing the topics of macro, micro diversity, the principle of diversity, doing the two sums in the textbook, then on to the third unit, covering all the shift keyings including Gaussian Minimum which I am and was afraid of. Prasanna the great said that he took just 53 minutes to finish the third unit. He's like a really awesome dude, always confident and no matter what you say, he always believes in himself and his ability to grow. I want to grow to acquire this side of him. After that, it's to the equalisers part of the fourth unit. Then, after finishing OFDM and CDMA thoroughly from the fifth unit, I will attempt to finish away with GSM. That way, I'll be leaving IS-95 and the third generation standards. Then, I hope to finish the propagation mechanisms part detailed in the second unit. By 10' O Clock in the morning, I will drive to Shan's(most kindhearted person who puts up with my weirdness) place. There, just going to do two important things.
1. Finish Shrinaath's sop( Shrinaath is really cool with a very different worldview. He gets on with people and just has an instant connect with anyone, when he chooses to. )(35 minutes)
2. Redo the third, fourth and fifth units thoroughly and finish with the theory of the second unit.
 I plan to reach home around 5:30, sleep till 6:00 and then write and practice the entire set of sums in the second unit from a local author. Then, starting again on the fifth unit. This is the sort of timetable I have. I should follow it. I've always known when to bear down. And, I really hope that I get the results this time around. I really need the results this time around.

Drone Aerospace Systems you su**!

I am for one, absolutely shocked. The price of an AT91sam7- evaluation kit is Rs.13,600. (281$ )Drone Aerospace refused to answer a single email that I posted to them. Now, I know why. Because everything we might require is already on http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/AT91SAM7SE-EK/AT91SAM7SE-EK-ND/1206696
D.A.S.(Drone Aerospace Systems Ltd.) appeared to state very clearly that they had fabricated the board themselves. So, we thought that well, these guys must have done the entire job on their own including the choosing of whatever they put on to the board(pardon my lack of big words I mean the placing of the chips, memory etc.) In fact, whenever I phoned Prasanna, I got no satisfactory reply. Hell! The guy seemed to act like he was no technical person.seemed to behave as if he had nothing else to do with it. Hell, they didn't even give us the user guide released by ATMEL.
http://www.atmel.in/Images/doc6241.pdf
I know this seems kind of weird, but a good idea might be to implement the software that I found on ATMEL's website. Because our board did not communicate with any of our laptops or the system at the Optics Lab.
http://www.atmel.in/tools/AT91SAMSOFTWAREPACKAGE.aspx
I should send a very strongly worded letter to Drone Aerospace Systems.
I would love to say at this point-
"We are going into the devil's nest. We are going to B'lore." But hey, what do the other guys have to say about it?

On the other hand, we have an I.M.U., G.P.S. module and SYS9400 board. Sriram anna has already implemented kalman filters to track real targets(realtime). So, can be expanded to visual servoing. It already runs Windows XP.

Am writing my SOR, SOP, PS,etc etc

Am presently writing my statement of research, statement of purpose, research interests, Curriculum Vitae, desired project, etc apart from studying for three exams I am not studying TQM,
have implemented a code that follows the steps detailed by Linus Helgesson. Things make so much more sense now. This is certainly not my Eureka moment but, this makes life so much more amazing. This diagram just look at it. All your problems will just fizzle out in no time. I am happy, truly happy. Linus, you've made this group a very happy group.

Found what I need::

Just found out some cool stuff. I don't know how to put captions here. I realized that you can get the soldering iron's solder point out.
I did it for both.
Now the thing is the microtip doesn't fit over the normal soldering iron. So, I need to get one sleeve that does the job. Then can solder wires on to the HC-05 Bluetooth module at college.

 

random stuff

http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/373144B-01/lvcgenhelp/cgen_gen_code_from_vis/
says the steps required to make C generator work.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520586/the-clever-circuit-that-doubles-bandwidth/
talks about a novel technique developed by Kumu networks that promises to receive and transmit data on the same frequency by using a circuit that can predict the self interference precisely and generate a cancellation signal for the same, and by using the vast amplitude difference between the transmitted and received signals differentiates the two thus doubling the bandwidth of data available.

Today completed my statement of research for Univ of Arizona hope they really consider my application. It took quite some time.

Am working on understanding quaternion transformations. have no book on the deriving motion equations so

http://www.briancbecker.com/blog/2011/why-i-detest-labview/
Gives an excellent account of how a guy comes to grips with a 'graphical'  'programming language'!!

http://www.microchip.com/forums/m598280-print.aspx
says that the C generator is really good.

http://blog.cordiner.net/2011/05/03/object-tracking-using-a-kalman-filter-matlab/
Will work on implementing the kalman filter found in this link. Hopefully will give enough of a boost to understand how Kalman filters can be used in our pentacopter. This would be at the final stages of the project. I guess!!
 

Oh my!

I find that the robotics module examples are based only on the CRIO and the SBRIO kits, which is disturbing. There is an example for localization with an extended kalman filter. Which still means that someone has to derive the motion equations.

Really new thing, this.  LIFA (Labview interface for ARDUINO)module works on bluetooth! what??!! I said what?!! interesting. So, now I get that you just canNOT transliterate the VI file into an ARDUINO 2560 file, you can just exchange data between two software programs.

Wrong C code generatorAn EKF can be designed in the control design user manual. instructions are possibly laid down over there. Labview can generate C code. Can we program the ARDUINO 2560 based on this C code? Nohttp://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/373144B-01/lvcgenhelp/cgen_gen_code_from_vis/
I just now found that the VI file has to be designed with a C code generator.
After downloading the 329 MB that was the C code generator I realised that it was for labview 2012, which I do not have.AAARRRRGH!

Now am downloading labview 2011's C code generator.
There is no C code generator for labview 2011. The link is replaced with the file for labview 2012. 
My feeling:
Honestly, I have second thoughts about this. Like all those who think the following
1. How do I plan on using NI labview without a CompactRIO, without hardware. Labview interacts with ARDUINO itself by bluetooth. So, using NI labview with 2560 won't work.
2. How do I plan to do the control loops without NI labview? It is impossible to do the work manually, in this time frame.(April final submission. so, by March must have results)
3. How do I plan to put all those control loops even if I write them onto the ARDUINO2560 which has 65 KB of memory.

My only answer to all these questions...... What else can I do?
There will be no progress, otherwise.
1. I can ask DRONE aerospace for help. That did not work much last time.
2. I can go to anywhere else, locally, but they would just advise us to pay 125 dollars for ARDUcopter and be done with it.
3. There is an Intel ATOM development board at college. will have to ask Dr. Premanand sir it worked realtime in ashwath anna's project in identifying, tracking him in a video.(realtime) but runs only the windows XP and Meego, Debian operating systems, It will probably work. but how do you code the control loops etc on to the ATOM board. They could run OpenCV on it, which means the windows XP can run anything including hopefully NI labview, system memory limit at 512 MB but supports Intel memory virtualization which hopefully means extension of the memory.


That's it.
Another thing. Please everybody, we need to get the motion equations before doing anything else. If we have these equations, we have state, if we have state, we can ask for desired position. then, we have navigation.. This is my view. If wrong, please correct.
Have to thank L.Ramanathan, Satheeswaran, Satish Ravichandran for help on understanding how to interface MATLAB with ARDUINO!!! Rama+ Sathees+Satish===genius!!

The following is the most inspiring post I have ever read till date. This is amazing. I have never had anyone, a teacher, a person who has learnt to continue learning to be a better individual; a better person; a better teacher for life than this person, Mr.Lee Hollman, whose post in NYC resistor reads:

It may be a bit of an odd request, but... does anyone have a used Wii console and controller that they'd consider donating to a school? I'd be using it to teach not only actual subjects, but even meditation (yes, you read that right) to help my special ed kids.(I plan on hooking it up to a SmartBoard and using games from thatgamecompany and Deepak Chopra in between classes).  I'll probably do a donorschoose project to get a Wii if no one here has one, but figured I'd try this board first. I received an awesome VEX kit from one of you generous folks here, once.

Incidientally, I teach all manner of robotics here, including coaching a Lego Mindstorms team, so any robotics kits that people don't want will find a good home here too. Please contact me, and I'll give you my school contact info and everything that you need to prove I'm legit. Thanks!

His email address reads:Lee_Hollman@hotmail.com

And, I hope that anyone who can, will support this person. Things like this are what can make an amazing future for people.

How do I start with deriving the equations of motion for the pentacopter?

will update tomorrow at 5:00 p.m.

till then let's wait and see. I also have my own examinations so please bear with me.

The following is the most inspiring post I have ever read till date. This is amazing. I have never had anyone, a teacher, a person who has learnt to continue learning to be a better individual; a better person; a better teacher for life than this person, Mr.Lee Hollman, whose post in NYC resistor reads:

It may be a bit of an odd request, but... does anyone have a used Wii console and controller that they'd consider donating to a school? I'd be using it to teach not only actual subjects, but even meditation (yes, you read that right) to help my special ed kids.(I plan on hooking it up to a SmartBoard and using games from thatgamecompany and Deepak Chopra in between classes).  I'll probably do a donorschoose project to get a Wii if no one here has one, but figured I'd try this board first. I received an awesome VEX kit from one of you generous folks here, once.

Incidientally, I teach all manner of robotics here, including coaching a Lego Mindstorms team, so any robotics kits that people don't want will find a good home here too. Please contact me, and I'll give you my school contact info and everything that you need to prove I'm legit. Thanks!

His email address reads:Lee_Hollman@hotmail.com

And, I hope that anyone who can, will support this person. Things like this are what can make an amazing future for people.

There and back again

1. Labview can make a quadcopter fly(http://labviewrobotics.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/how-to-build-a-quad-rotor-uav/). This person uses a powerPC 400 MHz processor with a SingleBoardRIO. It requires there to be a compactRIO, hardware that was made by N.I., that costs Rs. 2,35,700. Again, it does work for the ARDUINO as presented at this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGRhIQneO6w. This is just for the switching of an LED. LIFA(Labview interface for ARDUINO) is a free download that helps you do just that. You need to download the VI package manager and then the LIFA interface. That's just it.
2. French company 'Parrot' has developed an interface between its own on board computer based on an RTOS(which I don't know about yet), and Labview. This means that there is no general case like for the ARDUINO.
3. A real time operating system is used to process real time requests without buffering delays. A RTOS is focused on a narrow set of applications. Therefore, we want to classify it as 'hard' or 'soft' depending on the variabliity in jitter. Jitter is the variability in time taken to accept and complete an application's task. There is something called the R.O.S. the robot operating system developed at Stanford. Have to follow up on what it is.
4. To simulate control of the pentacopter I need to develop an X plane plane simulator version of the pentacopter, that will give linear velocities and positions of the penta in the X plane environment.  This will be supplied as input to the VI file in Labview using the SIL(Standard Interchange Language that is based on SQL and allows for transfer of data between software programs)http://www.sbai2013.ufc.br/pdfs/8127.pdf
Again, you do require to mathematically model the motion equations, to even get the thing onto
5. Something that really gives me hope alot of hope

"The system was simple. Each propeller created a thrust, and the four thrusts combined to counteract gravity. We put together our model using text-based code in an NI LabVIEW MathScriptNode, checked it against the literature, and moved forward to the control code.

We wanted to combine a linear-quadratic regulator (LQR) with a Kalman filter to build a Linear-Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control algorithm. LabVIEW software provided the tools to make the model linear, create the gain matrices for the LQR controller, help tune the Kalman filter, and implement the LQR and Kalman filter. We wrapped the closed-loop system in a LabVIEW Control Design and Simulation Module Loop, tuned a few parameters, and assembled a full simulation of the system.

Here was the exciting part: By using the LabVIEW toolchain, we had the opportunity to reuse the work we did modeling and developing the control algorithm to create the deployed system. We moved the simulation code to the real-time processor of the NI Single-Board RIO and replaced the model of the quadcopter with real I/O. And, with a little tuning, we had a flying robot."http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/pub/p/id/1012

6.http://www.sbai2013.ufc.br/pdfs/7920.pdf describes in a relatively simpler method, the idea of motion of a quadcopter, it's simpler because the author does not just put a couple of results and graphs and actually goes through with solving the equations.

7. I spoke to my good friend Vidya, who promised to teach me something about Kalman filters so that I can understand how and when to use it in the project. This is a long term thing. 

Current goals==

1. Finish the motion equations.

2. Finish the simulation using SIL  SIMULINK/X-Plane or SIL NI LABVIEW/X- Plane

Finish the above by January's end. 

Okay even if I do get the control  loops ready, will there be enough memory on board the ARDUINO ATMEGA2560 board to do those computations for attitude, the extended kalman filter etc.!!!!