News Archives

September 30th, 2009 Look mAh, No Hands Aircraft Look mAh, No Hands Team Paparazzi was a big success at the 2009 UAV Outback Challenge held at Kingaroy Airport, Queensland, Australia, Sep. 28-30. Team "Look mAh, no hands!" representing Brisbane Grammar School, won the 'Robot Airborne Delivery Challenge' placing 1st, after performing an autonomous mission phase including autonomous payload release. The team consisted of four members in their senior years of high-school, and was led by team captain Ben Paratz. Many thanks to the paparazzi community, not only for the autopilot itself but for the assistance that was enthusiastically given whenever needed. Link to competition September 24th, 2009 Fire-Storm Solar-Storm EMAV09 has already passed, now it is time to reveal our (ENAC-ISAE) new designs: Fire-Storm a 50cm wingspan MAV. Solar-Storm a 50cm wingspan MAV with hybrid power supply (solar and batteries). June 20th, 2009 The USU-OSAM Paparazzi team won the 1st place in the 7th AUVSI (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International) Student Unmanned Aircraft System Competition (18 teams total). The competition was held at Webster Field, Maryland, Jun. 17-20. The honor also goes to all the Paparazzi community, especially the developers. Link to competition June 19th, 2009 The Paparazzi System has been shown at Paris Le Bourget Airshow by three companies: Fly-n-Sense with products FNS900-Seeker and ScanCopter CB500. AeroArt with the plume project with the support of Fly-n-Sense. Thales with the Spy'Arrow MAV. May 26th, 2009 ENAC / Paparazzi has won the ONERA-DGA Challenge with a quadrotor. Twelve teams of French Universities out of 19 were chosen by ONERA-DGA to participate to this two years contest. ENAC designed a Paparazzi equipped Asctec quadrotor with an IMU developed in its lab. April 7th, 2009 Dear Paparazzi's, the registration for EMAV09 is now open at http://www.emav09.org/. We look forward to meeting many paparazzi teams at this yearly event. March 24, 2009 Funjet launch on Spitsbergen We were back in the Arctic flying Paparazzi aircrafts on Svalbard (N78° E15°) doing research with the Geophysical Institute of the University of Bergen/Norway. There are two teams operating near Longyearbyen, one on the apron of Longyearbyen airport (LYR) and the other at the old northern lights research station in Adventdalen. We had permission to fly up to 1500m outside the airport opening times. The Paparazzi aircrafts work perfectly...for humans it is just a little cold. Last night we flew having -32°C (-25°F) on the ground. There is a video showing a 1500m vertical profile flight. February 16th, 2009 We have a new forum to talk about this project. Please visit and participate http://www.azoreanuav.com/forum . Please, vote in the next link to continue with the forum or not. http://www.azoreanuav.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7 February 9th, 2009 3 ENAC students have released a Graphical control application for Paparazzi on Mobile phone using Java technoligies. Check the Ipodrom project page for more details. January 19, 2009 Paparazzi Developers, This is to announce a Call for Papers for the 2009 ASME/IEEE International Conference on Mechatronic and Embedded Systems and Applications (MESA09), part of ASME IDETC09. The conference is to be held August 30 - September 2, 2009 at San Diego Convention Center. This Call for Papers is specific to the Session chaired by myself, Antoine Drouin , and Anton Kochevar. This topic of this session is " Open Source UAV Autopilots: Status and Progression", part of a symposium of MESA09 called "Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Technologies and Applications (SUAVTA)". This Technical Session is meant to be a session that will focus on Paparazzi, the topics can include specific features developed for Paparazzi or applications using Paparazzi along with other innovative aspects or uses of Paparazzi. We hope to make this one of the largest and best conferences dealing with Paparazzi. Please help us to promote Paparazzi and bring this amazing project to even more people. Full paper deadline is Feb. 27, 2009 using the online submission system. Conference Website: https://www.asmeconferences.org/IDETC09/ (click MESA09, then, UAV Symposium, then this dedicated session) or http://iel.ucdavis.edu/mesa/MESA09/ If you have any further questions please email me at daniel.morgan @ aggiemail.usu.edu (remove spaces) Research Associate, Center for Self-Organizing and Intelligent Systems at Utah State University http://www.engr.usu.edu/wiki/index.php/User:CSOIS September 23, 2008 A paparazzi team took part in the Motodrone event held in Finowfurt near Berlin. It was fun, the beer was cool and barbecues worked flawlessly. And we flew funjets... Video June 23, 2008 The OSAM Paparazzi team took 2nd place in the Sixth Annual Student Unmanned Aerial Systems Competition! The event is sponsored by AUVSI (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International) and was held at Webster Field, St. Inigoes, Maryland. It should also be noted that this was Paparazzi's and the OSAM Paparazzi team's first time at the competition. Link to competition Highlight Video of Competition June 13, 2008 Tiny WithOut Gps The new baby autopilot is born. His name is TWOG, he weighs 8 grams and is 40.2 x 30.5mm long. He' in good health and looks a lot like his mother Tiny v2, except for the GPS receiver. The proud parents invite you to visit the pictures and technical information album... March 26, 2008 Funjet on the helicopter deck Scientists from the Geophysical Institute of the University of Bergen/Norway flew Paparazzi controlled Funjet aircrafts equipped with meteorological sensors in the Arctic sea around Spitsbergen only with the help of a RC safety pilot and no Paparazzi team member nearby. They took off and landed on the helicopter deck of the Norwegian icebreaking coast guard vessel KV Svalbard for one week and set a new Paparazzi low temperature record by flying at around -20°C and 15m/s wind in altitudes up to 1500m. For another two weeks they also collected data on Spitsbergen near Longyearbyen. See pictures in the gallery and a video. March 15, 2008 Tiny 2.11 A number of vendors are now offering assembled and unassembled autopilots, sensors and accessories. The software is written, the hardware is built, what are you waiting for? Getting started has never been easier! More details on the Get Hardware page. February 6, 2008 Paparazzi running on eeePC Looking for a small, light and cheap ground station ? Paparazzi runs on the ASUS eeePC out of the box (after installing the Debian Paparazzi packages). Tested on the pre-installed Xandros distribution, on a standard Ubuntu and on the preconfigured eeeXubuntu. January 27, 2008 Paparazzi's Storm on TV in Turkey Storm on TV, A Paparazzi aircraft is featured on the biggest Television station in Turkey. (Sorry, the audio is only in Turkish...) December 27, 2007 Paparazzi Control Station next to Toulouse, France From the 24C3 conference, Paparazzi aircraft operated in Hildesheim, Germany and in Castagnac, France (the station in Istanbul, Turkey was lacking a security pilot) were remote controlled in real time by Martin and Antoine. The three local ground control stations and the remote one in Berlin were connected to a central server (located in Germany). Video from the 2 aircraft was also visible from the conference room in real-time. A great team work and ... a lot of fun. See media section for some press coverage. The session video is available as torrent here in Matroska or MPEG-4 format and this are the presentation slides. December 13, 2007 Tiny v2.1 in a Funjet The new Tiny 2.1 autopilot nicely flew in a Funjet for the first time. September 21st, 2007 Antoine launching the Storm1 MAV 07 was yet another great success for the project! Paparazzi teams took 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th places in the outdoor autonomous surveillance competition and were honored to share the 1st place award with the very well designed Micropilot-equipped 48cm Ping Wing from Linköping University in Sweden. The first Paparazzi helicopter, Twisted Logic proved that a passively stable helicopter could operate well in mild outdoor winds and also took 2nd place in the indoor competition, surpassed only by the "Father of passively stable helicopters", world famous Petter Muren of Proxflyer and BladeRunner fame. The team of Christian Lindenberg and (fake) Martin Müller also won the special award from the jury for it general performance and fair spirit. September 17th, 2007 MAV 07 MAV 07 will be held in Toulouse, France (of course!) September 17-21, 2007. Expect to see lots of great Paparazzi systems kicking ass and taking names! August 28, 2007 Paul MacCready 1925-2007 Dr. Paul MacCready, legendary aeronautical engineer and founder of Aerovironment, died in his sleep at the age of 81. Many of us met him met him in 2005 at MAV05 in Germany but all of us are familiar with his incredible body of work ranging from the first human powered aircraft, to the GM Sunraycer electric car, and the world altitude record holding Helios. MacCready was a world champion sailplane pilot, holds a Cal Tech Ph.D. in aeronautics, has been granted 7 honorary degrees, and has contributed a total of 4 aircraft and one car to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution. He founded Aerovironment in 1971, the world's largest supplier of hand-launched UAVs. August 21th, 2007 Flying south west of the Hofsjökull glacier Three Paparazzi equipped Funjets were part of the Flohof measurement campaign around the Hofsjökull glacier on Iceland. We were able to measure temperature, humidity, pressure and estimate the wind. The authorities issued a NOTAM, clearing the airspace up to 12.000 feet which allowed us to set a new Paparazzi altitude record. March 1st, 2007 Part of the ENAC multiplex foamy fleet Sun is finally back. We took all those babies for a multiple aircrafts flight. From left to right : 600g minimag, 900g twinjet, 600g funjet and 350g microjet. It's such a shame that multiplex stoped producing microjets..... they didn't even ask us :( February 5th, 2007 Download the video Jeremie Vacher, a student at ENAC, has developed a tracker for antennas. It is functionnal but still needs a little bit of polishing. Anybody interrested ? December 7th, 2006 Download the video Antoine continues to make great progress toward the holy grail of 17 state inertial navigation and releases a video showing the performance of the 7-state Kalman filtered IMU providing the attitude-heading reference system (AHRS) on his quadrotor. Note how much coffee was consumed in preparation for this video. More info on the IMU is available on the sensors page. Also, be sure to admire the schematics and source code! November 28th, 2006 Michel Gorraz launches the Dragon Slayer for the ENAC team Two Paparazzi teams, ENAC/Miraterre and Martin Mueller/Christian Lindeberg won 2nd and 3rd place at the MAV06 competition. Unfortunately, both teams had insufficient video resolution to identify the 1.5m ground target required for high-scoring and the winning prize went to Bringham Young University who was able to identify 2 of the 3 targets with a Panasonic KX-141 camera and an unusually narrow 30 degree FOV lens. The Bringham Young team used the Procerus Kestrel autopilot (originally developed at the university) and obviously practiced video target recognition much more than the rest of us. Flight performance and navigation for both Dragon Slayers and the Black One was exceptional as usual. All planes performed flawless autonomous takeoffs and landings and the Slayer performed an autonomous paintball drop with wind-corrected precision that put the ball within 3 meters of the designated target from an altitude of 40 meters in a 5 m/s wind. As luck would have it, the stress of managing two aircraft from a single ground station during an intense competition, aggravated by a misbehaving GPS in one of the planes that required a power and flight-plan reset just prior to launch resulted in us neglecting to re-input the target coordinates and the ball was dropped accurately on the default target location, not the actual target location provided by the judges just prior to flight. See the complete MAV06 Photo Gallery See you next year in Toulouse for MAV07. 2003 - 2006 Paparazzi 1.2.1, the first complete, presentable version of the now famous autopilot Paparazzi has come a long way since it's creation in 2003. For a bit of nostalgia browse the original website