When the RC Ekranoplan master himself, Mr. Think Flight (aka Kavin), asked me to help take his new ground effect vehicle to the next level, it was the perfect chance to build my own radio controlled ground effect vehicle. To achieve ‘Next Level,’ I built a flight computer with an autonomous, vision-based control algorithm.

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Rctestflight’s Ekranoplan development:    • R/C Ground Effect Vehicle with LiDAR ...  
Autonomous quadrotor motion planning:    • Making a Drone Smarter With Motion Pl...  
dRehmflight VTOL Flight Controller:    • dRehmFlight VTOL - Teensy (Arduino) F...  

The very nature of ground effect is self-stabilizing, meaning that an aircraft flying in ground effect will eventually settle on a ‘cushion’ of air and maintain the same altitude without any control inputs needed. But on lightweight models, settling into this equilibrium is hard because they’re so sensitive to disturbances like the wind. So, a lidar-based ground effect altitude hold controller implemented in my flight control code, dRehmFlight, helped keep my ekranoplan in ground effect. From there, flying it was just like driving an RC car, so I felt comfortable enough to hand the controls over to a Raspberry Pi running Robot Operating System (ROS), an AprilTag detection algorithm, and some custom 'follow-me' controller code. Hopefully this works on Kavin’s 7ft Ekranoplan!

00:00 Intro
01:37 Building and Testing My RC Ekranoplan
04:32 Adding Lidar Altitude Hold
07:28 Flight Computer and Computer Vision Development
09:21 Flying the Flight Computer
10:51 Conclusions

#Ekranoplan #GroundEffect #ComputerVision