An Impromptu Quadcopter Drone Project at Microsoft...

  Having some spare time over the holidays, I post a question to the Microsoft Maker email group about how to go about picking a drone from among the numerous options available on the market.  I get a response from Jay in Microsoft Research saying that he's just bought an "AeroQuad Arduino based flight control system and will be mating it to a Parallax ELEV-8 chassis" in January, and asking me to "show up at Building 112 on the morning of Jan 6 if I am interested".  Suffice it to say that I am at the designated location on Monday, Jan 6.  Turns out it is the week long Microsoft Research Make Fest kick off, and before I know it, I am part of a team of 6 whose goal it is to assemble a flight worthy drone with image and face recognition capabilities by end of the week.  We have embraced the somewhat Orwellian undertaking of building a drone that can zone in on people in an area, photograph their faces, send the pictures to a face recognition cloud service, and identify a designated suspect...er, person. Here's how the week unfolds…

We convert a meeting room into our top secret quadcopter drone project HQ for the week, ducking in and out between meetings and our day jobs to work on the drone...

We unpack the Parallax ELEV-8 chassis

Mike and Ashish assemble the quadcopter. This takes them about 8 hours in all.

I get working on soldering the AeroQuad flight control board. I haven't done any soldering in nearly 20 years, so this takes me a few hours in all! Luckily, the awesome MSR workshop contains all the tools I'll ever need for the job, plus much more...

Another view of the MSR workshop, which is chock full of 3D printers, CNC machines, laser cutters, and other goodies...

The finished AeroQuad flight control board contains the Arduino open source autopilot board, a 6DOF gyro and accelerometer, and the radio R/T board.

Jay, Andres and Mark work on getting the BeagleBone (a Raspberry Pi like computer) up and running with Ubuntu Linux. The BeagleBone will, among other things, run a NodeJS webservice enabling wi-fi transmission of telemetry data and the pictures and video taken by the drone's onboard cameras to the mission computer / laptop. See below for a whiteboard systems diagram...

Shady gets working on the getting the pictures and video from the mission computer / laptop to the MSR cloud to perform image analysis and face recognition. Not sure if it will work in all situations, though...

On Day 4, Mike and Ashish test the quadcopter in the lab...

...and outdoors, where the quadcopter takes a somewhat unexpected trajectory through the air....(click for video)

The night before the projects are due, we cut a new part to mount the flight control board using Visio and the laser cutter

At the final presentation, we're careful to keep flying time and height to a minimum. You see, we didn't have time to implement the "altitude hold" feature, and a manually controlled quadcopter can be a lethal weapon......(click for video)

In the interest of safety, we demonstrate the face recognition feature by physically carrying the quadcopter up to Shady's face. The drone's camera captures Shady's picture ands sends it to the BeagleBone to the mission control laptop to the MSR Image / Face recognition Azure cloud, and we get a positive in about 5 seconds. It works! ... (click for video)

It's been a great week working with some amazingly smart and collaborative folks. Now, take a look at one of the other projects at the MSR Make Fest, the Fiber Optic Tree... (click for video)

Visit to a Tijuana Drone Factory

 It’s 7 am in the morning on Dec 6 and I’m in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box in San Ysidro, CA, waiting for someone called Guillermo I know only from a couple of brief email exchanges.  Guillermo is going to drive me across the border into Tijuana, Mexico to visit a robotic drone factory.  As in a factory that makes robotic flying vehicles, not a factory where robots make other robots, at least not yet.  I scan each passing vehicle hoping to identify Guillermo in a flash of extra-sensory insight, a project with a low probability of success given the throngs of Mexicans milling around the parking lot and the nearby tram terminal.  Guillermo shows up shortly in a white truck and mutual recognition is surprisingly instantaneous (try that, Google Glass!), leaving me no opportunity to try out my limited Spanish with the locals - “Guillermo no esta aqui, dónde está la fábrica de aviones no tripulados robot”, anyone?  We breeze through the border to find ourselves in front of the 3D Robotics factory, located in an industrial park about 5 minutes from the border, where my adventure starts…

I leave my car in San Ysidro on the US side of the border.  At $8 / day, parking is dirt cheap.

The 3D Robotics factory is located in Tijuana about a mile and a half from the border.

 

 

The 3D Robotics factory building looks like it could be anywhere in Silicon Valley.

 

The interior has multiple rooms, including a CAM workshop for cutting metal parts…

 ….a circuit board manufacturing and drone assembly room…

 

…where finished drones are churned out ready to ship.

 

Here, Guillermo describes the features of a drone that is ready to ship (click for video).

 

The Arduino-based Autopilot circuit boards are printed in sheets like postage stamps…

 

…from electronic components that are imported in spools from China….

 

…and tested for defects on the spot.

 

The GPS chips are imported from Switzerland and use signals from up to nine satellites for precision.  Here, they are being tested as part of the assembly process.

 

There’s a dedicated Testing Lab to perform additional quality control tests…

 

Here, one of the test engineers walks through the components of a typical drone (click for video)…

 

…and then describes the mission planning and flight control software, which uses Google Earth (click for video).

 

After I am done with my factory visit, Guillermo drops me off at the border crossing, where I stand in line for an hour…

 

…and give $2 to a nurse collecting money for charity (I hear later it’s a scam), before getting through US immigration.

 

After lunch, I head to the 3D Robotics’ R&D office in San Diego, to see what they do up there...

 

Among other things, R&D is working on ultra-strong carbon fiber propellers (they spin at 4-12,000 RPM!)…

 

….and different drone configurations, including this redundant, “dual propeller” quad rotor design.

3D Robotics’ Arduino-based Autopilot supports multiple configurations, including fixed wing aircraft and ground vehicles…

 

…like this weird craft that looks like a WWII B17 bomber crossed with a Predator drone…

 

…and this fun-looking Rover…

 

I have no idea what this is supposed to be!

 

If I were to summarize the key takeaways from my visit to 3D Robotics, they are as follows:

1.      Mexico, especially Tijuana, has a decent pool of both hardware and software engineers and is an alternative to both China and India for product development and manufacturing

2.      3D Robotics has shown that you can build a for-profit business using open source designs for hardware, electronics and software, and continue to receive the support and collaboration of the open source community

3.      The drones they are a-comin’.  3D Robotics has about 50,000 customers world-wide and growing.  Many of them are hobbyists, but increasingly, they are business customers like construction companies and (ahem) “security” firms.