simon@engcon.marshall.ltv.com (SHSIMON) (06/14/91)
I am also interested in building a hovering robot. A posting over the net a while ago discussed the First International Aerial Robotics Competition sponsored by the Assoc. for Unmanned Vehicle Systems (202) 371-1170 and held at Georgia Inst. Tech. in Atlanta around July 26. Contact Robert Michelson at (404) 528-7568 for more details. Mainly it is a competition between 10 universities across the U.S. (& U.K.) to build an autonomous flying vehicle that can perform a repetitive, retrieval task without manual aid in a given time period. I expect these designs to be more expensive than you are interested in I have been looking at electric helicopters. They cost ~$800 ready-to-fly, are very difficult to fly manually, brittle, and dangerous. However, with a few robotic servos, these problems may be overcome. The July 1991 issue of MODEL BUILDER reviews the Kalt Whisper electric helicopter. There is also a Kyosho EP Concept (EP stands for Electric Power). Both helicopters are about the same price and have about a 37 in blade. The Electric Power column on pp 24-26 mentions a Kyosho Hughes 300 electric helicopter with a 23-in rotor, that can be flown inside of a garage. This is on p. 26 in the last section. In the first paragraph of the article on p. 24, the author mentions a company that sells electric parts...I have not been able to to reach them yet. Finally, if you can find helicopter model, electric, small, about 23 in rotor under $500...with a protector ring on the rotor and still able to carry about 4 - 10 oz of additional electronics, I have an interesting design for making it autonomous for under ~$500 in components. But I have not seen anyone do it ye yet, so I imagine there are a lot of people out there looking for the same thing. Oh, one other...the MIT Robotics Lab has robotics competitions and they have flown a robotic blimp...you may want to contact them. Please post any more hovering info that you uncover. Good Luck. Hank
dj@ctron.com (DJ Delorie) (06/14/91)
This thread is starting to sound like the topics on rec.models.rc . You could probably get oodles of information if you cross-post there (provided you get that group). R/C flyers have had much experience with helicopters, planes, blimps, remote control, payloads, etc; but I can't guarantee that they'll read this group. DJ dj@ctron.com