3D Printing A Construction Kit for Micro Drone Racing Gates: D4G AI Racing Part 1
Over the last couple of weeks I've been designing and 3D printing drone racing gates intended for 100mm sized micro drones. The rest of this post details the results of this experiment and explains how this is part one of a larger project in AI and the automatic control of drones.
All of the 3D printed designs from this post are free to download on the Thingiverse site: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4022118
To get started, here are the results of all my hard work:
To make the octagon gate requires: 2x feet, 8x 45 degree corners, 4x 180 degree corners, 4x long frame sections and 8x short frame sections.
To make the square gate requires: 2x feet, 4x 90 degree corners, 8x 180 degree corners and 12x long frame sections.
From the videos you can see that I've built a modular design that has elements that can be incorporated into lots of different shapes of gate. Using AutoDesk Fusion 360 I've built a selection of corners, frame sections and feet.
To start with, there are two main frame sections, one 12cm long and the other 9cm. I started with the short section and increased the length as far as I could while maintaining an object that could be printed vertically without support. While it is possible to print horizontally with support, it's a real headache to clean the models up for use, so I print vertically. The longer one here takes about 1 hour and 35 minutes on an Ultimaker 3, while the short one takes 1 hour and 11 minutes.
Next, I made a 90 degree corner and a 180 degree "corner" so that I could make a basic square gate. By this point I had realised that it was impossible to print frame sections long enough for gates you could fly through, so I was going to need to join them together. Print time for each is around the 35 minute mark.
Then came the octagon joint, which is 45 degrees. You need eight of these to make the octagonal gate shown above, so it takes a day of printing just to make the angles (37 minutes each). The octagon is definitely my favourite gate, though, so it's definitely worth the effort.
Finally, I made a foot to stand everything on. Printing time is 2 hours 17 minutes, so I would still like to optimise this design a bit more to reduce the print time. It's a bit over-designed as it is, but it works and you only need two per gate.
After printing lots of corners and frame sections, I started to get a bit creative with my drone gate construction kit and began to wonder what kinds of shapes I could construct. The "three way 90 degree corner" above is still a work in progress, but this will enable me to make a cube shape as a "table top" for landing on. This requires a suitable landing pad on top of the frame, but I'm still thinking about a creative way to 3D print this. Just don't ask me about landing drones on these types of obstacles as it's my Achilles' heel. There's a great video of me at the first ever UK Drone Show flying the University Agility Course and completely failing to hit the "table top" several times and eventually crashing [blog post]. Also, I need some "T sections" if I'm going to make a tunnel. I'm thinking of a half octagon at each end, maybe elongated at the top to make the entrance wider, with horizontal pieces connecting the two octagons so it stands upright on its own as a tunnel.
What I learned from this exercise it that I'm impatient and the 3D printing takes far too long. This is why I made all the connectors square sections, as the corners are fairly quick to print and you don't need too many of them to make a gate. Making the frame sections is a bit of a pain as they take ages to print and are a bit too small, so you have to double and triple them to make the gate sides. My idea was that the corners can be 3D printed, then much longer frame sections can be constructed using a more conventional method. The point about the joints being square with a bevel is that you could buy PVC pipe of the right diameter, cut it to length and fit it over the connectors. Alternatively, you could buy ABS or wood sheet which could either be cut manually or CNC cut to make a box.
Finally, this is only part one of a series looking at the automatic control of drones. I needed a gate in order to attach markers, take photos and train an AI vision system to detect the flyable hole in the middle. I've been thinking for some time about building an automatic control system for a drone and programming it to fly through race gates all by itself. We had a go at the Drone Racing League AIRR competition last year, but didn't get past the selection stage. This made me think about creating my own kit and using it as part of the Drone Masterclasses that we run. It's always been my aim to get the kids writing software that runs on the drone, but it's proved too difficult up to now. My idea is to put together some open source hardware and software that works for making the drone fly through the gates and then run it as a coding and drone racing competition for kids. Yes, that's correct, the AIRR Competition can get the very best robotics and vision experts in the world to fly hugely expensive 80mph drones through gates, while I'm suggesting doing it on a budget of about £500 with a bunch of school kids.
This post is just the preliminary stage. The next one will show how to make a laptop control a drone via an Arduino and FrSky TX module. In fact, the kit from the last post I did on the iRange module setup could be seen as a Part 0 in the development sequence.
To be continued.
All of the 3D printed designs from this post are free to download on the Thingiverse site: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4022118
To get started, here are the results of all my hard work:
To make the octagon gate requires: 2x feet, 8x 45 degree corners, 4x 180 degree corners, 4x long frame sections and 8x short frame sections.
To make the square gate requires: 2x feet, 4x 90 degree corners, 8x 180 degree corners and 12x long frame sections.
From the videos you can see that I've built a modular design that has elements that can be incorporated into lots of different shapes of gate. Using AutoDesk Fusion 360 I've built a selection of corners, frame sections and feet.
To start with, there are two main frame sections, one 12cm long and the other 9cm. I started with the short section and increased the length as far as I could while maintaining an object that could be printed vertically without support. While it is possible to print horizontally with support, it's a real headache to clean the models up for use, so I print vertically. The longer one here takes about 1 hour and 35 minutes on an Ultimaker 3, while the short one takes 1 hour and 11 minutes.
Next, I made a 90 degree corner and a 180 degree "corner" so that I could make a basic square gate. By this point I had realised that it was impossible to print frame sections long enough for gates you could fly through, so I was going to need to join them together. Print time for each is around the 35 minute mark.
Then came the octagon joint, which is 45 degrees. You need eight of these to make the octagonal gate shown above, so it takes a day of printing just to make the angles (37 minutes each). The octagon is definitely my favourite gate, though, so it's definitely worth the effort.
Finally, I made a foot to stand everything on. Printing time is 2 hours 17 minutes, so I would still like to optimise this design a bit more to reduce the print time. It's a bit over-designed as it is, but it works and you only need two per gate.
After printing lots of corners and frame sections, I started to get a bit creative with my drone gate construction kit and began to wonder what kinds of shapes I could construct. The "three way 90 degree corner" above is still a work in progress, but this will enable me to make a cube shape as a "table top" for landing on. This requires a suitable landing pad on top of the frame, but I'm still thinking about a creative way to 3D print this. Just don't ask me about landing drones on these types of obstacles as it's my Achilles' heel. There's a great video of me at the first ever UK Drone Show flying the University Agility Course and completely failing to hit the "table top" several times and eventually crashing [blog post]. Also, I need some "T sections" if I'm going to make a tunnel. I'm thinking of a half octagon at each end, maybe elongated at the top to make the entrance wider, with horizontal pieces connecting the two octagons so it stands upright on its own as a tunnel.
What I learned from this exercise it that I'm impatient and the 3D printing takes far too long. This is why I made all the connectors square sections, as the corners are fairly quick to print and you don't need too many of them to make a gate. Making the frame sections is a bit of a pain as they take ages to print and are a bit too small, so you have to double and triple them to make the gate sides. My idea was that the corners can be 3D printed, then much longer frame sections can be constructed using a more conventional method. The point about the joints being square with a bevel is that you could buy PVC pipe of the right diameter, cut it to length and fit it over the connectors. Alternatively, you could buy ABS or wood sheet which could either be cut manually or CNC cut to make a box.
Finally, this is only part one of a series looking at the automatic control of drones. I needed a gate in order to attach markers, take photos and train an AI vision system to detect the flyable hole in the middle. I've been thinking for some time about building an automatic control system for a drone and programming it to fly through race gates all by itself. We had a go at the Drone Racing League AIRR competition last year, but didn't get past the selection stage. This made me think about creating my own kit and using it as part of the Drone Masterclasses that we run. It's always been my aim to get the kids writing software that runs on the drone, but it's proved too difficult up to now. My idea is to put together some open source hardware and software that works for making the drone fly through the gates and then run it as a coding and drone racing competition for kids. Yes, that's correct, the AIRR Competition can get the very best robotics and vision experts in the world to fly hugely expensive 80mph drones through gates, while I'm suggesting doing it on a budget of about £500 with a bunch of school kids.
This post is just the preliminary stage. The next one will show how to make a laptop control a drone via an Arduino and FrSky TX module. In fact, the kit from the last post I did on the iRange module setup could be seen as a Part 0 in the development sequence.
To be continued.
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