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From Dronepedia
Welcome to Dronepedia: A place to compile knowledge on the design, building, and usage of civilian unmanned aerial vehicles. From simple RC gliders and indoor helicopter toys to sophisticated survey equipment, piloting vehicles without being in the cockpit has become a popular and inexpensive hobby as well as a rapidly growing professional field. As interest in this topic grows, participants have to quickly acquire knowledge of disparate topics like aerodynamics, airframe engineering, robotics, photography, and piloting via radio control, first-person video, & various autopilots. This site aims to consolidate the vast amounts of great research contained in flourishing communities of blogs and forums, in an easier-to-digest form.
Contents |
News
July 2012
Antispam efforts have been made a lot easier by a new revision of Mediawiki in which Questycaptcha is working and included by default, rather than broken; It is now feasible to maintain the site again. A video embedding extension has just been installed, which nicely sidesteps both copyright concerns with hosting other people's pictures, and deep-linking concerns with images.
Site Map
Types of Vehicle
- Aerial
- Fixed-wing planes
- Helicopters controlled by cyclic and collective pitch oscillations
- Electronically controlled multirotors - Simple quadro-, hexa-, octo- copters controlled by thrust differentials
- Electromechanical multirotors - Bi-, Tri- copters and other mechanically complex designs
- Hybrid tilting aircraft - Can both hover and glide
- unguided Balloons
- Blimps
- Paramotor - Nonrigid Wings
- Ultralight - Hang Gliders, Rogallo Wing craft, powered kites, a 'hollow' fabric airfoil on a frame
- Kites - Tethered wind-powered aircraft
- Exotic aircraft
Aircraft are the main focus of this site, but all unmanned robotic vehicles are of interest:
- Ground vehicle locomotion
- Road Autonomous cars
- All-terrain Rovers
- two-wheeled frame dragging bots like the Roomba
- two-wheeled Inverted pendulum vehicles
- Tracked vehicles
- Bipedal vehicles - 2 legs, several joints, fully dynamically stable
- Striding vehicles - 4+ legs, hip joint only, mostly dynamically stable
- Loping vehicles - 4+ legs, several joints, fuselage in cyclic motion (mammal style), mostly dynamically stable
- Creeping vehicles - 6+ legs, several joints, fuselage stationary (insect style), individual actuation, passively stable
- Slithering vehicles - Articulated fuselage with the ability to slide (snake style), passively stable
- Rolling vehicles - Entire fuselage in rotation
- Climbing vehicles - limbs that can grasp and hold weight, passively stable
- Track mounted vehicles
- Marine
- Autonomous powerboats
- Autonomous sailboats
- Autonomous submarines
- ROV - Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles, deep-sea tethered devices
- Underwater gliders
- Thermal gradient gliders
- Stationary
- Robot arms for industrial use or as vehicle-mounted manipulators
- Robot manipulators
- Surface jamming
- Other robotics topics
- Swarming
- Mesh network
- Distributed problem solving
- Self-assembly
- Telepresence
- Robotics software
- Omnidirectional wheels
- Swarming
Fixed-Wing Aeronautics
- Airframe design & aerodynamics
- Trimming
- PID Tuning
- Materials
- Fuselage materials
- Wing construction Methods
- Wing saver
- Types of Foam
- Types of Covering material
- Brushless motor
- Electronic speed controller
- Batteries
- Nitro fuel
- Propeller
- Prop saver
- Control surfaces
- Fixed-wing landing and Safety Gear
- Solar power
- Autonomous thermal glider
- Launch methods
- Center of gravity - Determination & Nose-Heavy vs Tail-Heavy
- Popular Fixed-Wing Airframe Mods
Multirotor Aeronautics
- Prop configurations (Airframe Types)
- Multirotor airframe design
- Motors
- Propellers
- Multirotor landing gear
- Servos (for electromechanical multirotors)
- Navigation lights
Other Build Tools
- Layout Systems
- Construction Methods
- Foam cutting & sanding
- Woodworking
- Composite layup
- Composite materials
- Hand Layup
- Molds
- Vacuum Bagging
- 3D printing
- Battery charger
- Brushless Motor Power analyzer & Tachometers
- Scale
- Foam cutter
- Center of gravity finder
- Multimeter
- Glue
- Paint
- Tape
- Strobe video
- Plane storage
Guidance
- RC (Fly-By-Wireless)
- Autopilot concepts
- Feedback
- Comparison of Autopilots
- Open Autopilot Projects
- Ardupilot (OSS, OSH)
- Ardupilot Original
- Ardupilot NG
- Arducopter
- Ardupilot Mega
- UAV DevBoard (OSH) & MatrixPilot (OSS)
- Aeroquad (OSS, OSH)
- Gluonpilot
- OpenPilot
- Paparazzi
- Pixhawk
- Multipilot32
- UAVP NG (OSS, OSH)
- Autoquad (OSS, CSH)
- MultiWii (OSS) & MultiWiiCopter (OSS)
- Wii (CSH) & Arduino (OSH)
- Quadrino (CSH)
- Flyduino
- Nanowii
- Ardupilot (OSS, OSH)
- Commercial Autopilots
- FlyDuino
- DJI Hobby WooKong and Naza
- Retired and Experimental autopilots
- multirotor controllers
- Testing
Sensors
- Thermopile - Horizon Sensor
- IMU (3, 6, or 9 DoF)
- Accelerometer (3 DoF)
- Gyroscope (3 DoF)
- Magnetometer (3 DoF)
- Barometric Altimeter
- Variometer
- GPS
- Depth camera
- Laser Rangefinder - Parallax
- LIDAR - Time of travel
- Ultrasonic Rangefinder
Communications
- Radio Control
- Antenna
- FPV
- Ground station software
- Wireless modem
- Cellular modem
- Satellite modem
- 802.11
- MAVLink protocol
- Buddy box
- Emergency locator - GPS Dog Collars in the MURS band, etc
Airframes
- Commercial unmanned aerial systems - Oriented towards business & professional users
- Popular Fixed-Wing Airframes RTF, ARF, Kit planes
- Popular Helicopter Airframes
- Popular Multirotor Airframes
- Scratchbuilt Fixed-Wing Airframes
- Multirotor Design Concepts and Prototypes
Applications
- Aerial Photography
- Cinematic aerial photography - Video alternative to crane shots for movies, TV, & advertising.
- Commercial aerial photography - getting just the right angle
- Survey Aerial photography - Presenting: The Earth
- Photogrammetry - Now in 3D
- Agricultural aerial photography - Understanding what you grow, often using Infrared photography
- Structural inspection - As an alternative to manual inspections
- Wildlife photography
- Surveillance - Turning awareness into little monochrome screens
- Meteorology - In lieu of trying to insure a Hurricane Hunter
- Advertising
- Search and rescue
- Fighting Forest Fires
- Disaster Response
- Wireless Networking
- Livestock & game management
- Crop dusting
- Crowd control
- Drone journalism
- Accident investigation
- Flying pole for surveillance and awareness
- Military - Blowing things up
- Flying as a competitive hobby
- Aerobatics
- Stalled flight / hover 3D flying
- Powered flight Pattern flying
- Gliding flight Hotlining
- Thermal soaring
- Hand Launch
- High Start
- Motor Start
- Cross Country
- Slope soaring
- Sustained speed
- Pylon racing
- Indoor endurance
- RC combat
- Free flight models
- Control line flying
- UAV build competition / MAV control
- Aerobatics
Imaging
- Photography terms
- Cockpit video camera
- Keychain cams
- FPV cams
- Helmet cams
- Camera payloads
- Subcompact P&S
- Compact P&S
- Ultrazoom P&S
- Mirrorless
- DSLR
- Video payloads
- Pocket Video Cameras
- Consumer Camcorders
- Professional Video Cameras
- RGB & monochrome Industrial cameras
- Infrared photography
- Spectrometry
- Camera gimbals - Aiming your camera
Local Considerations
Laws, local communities, and fields for the following areas:
- United States
- United Kingdom
- Canada
- Australia
- New Zealand
- Germany
- South Africa
- France
- Poland
- Italy
- Russia
- Brazil
- Sweden
- Denmark
- India
FAQs & Articles
- Using the Same Frequency for Control and FPV/Telemetry
- Scale counts
- Branding
- Engine size and motor size
- Sailplanes vs flying wings
- Learning gliding controls
- Learning hovering controls
- Beginners guide collection
Policies
- Metric is preferred
- Military discussion is limited to purely aeronautic aspects.
- Lowercase should be used in article titles
- Organizational schemes
- Plural is discouraged in article titles
General Resources
DIYDrones blogs and forums
RC Groups forums
sUAS News professional UAV news
Wattflyer forums
RC Universe forums
Thirty Thousand Feet link repository
AP Landing Platforms & Technical forum
Everything You Wanted to Know about Electric Powered Flight - Ebook
