News Archives

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