From the demo video on the Bladestaronline.com website, it almost looks as though the remote has two focussed IR beams, and the Bladestar is staying near the intersection of the beams, perhaps? Here's a frame from the video, also if you watch the hand avoidance, I don't think it is due to prop wash or other physical airstream effects.
As she moves towards it, always aiming at the Bladestar, it moves away from her to keep about the same distance. I'd hazard a guess that the 'remote' is just beaming the same signal as the Bladestar itself emits to detect obstacles. At no time is the person in control staying put and flying the Bladestar around. Therefore I'd say it has no real 'control' system, just the avoidance triggered by IR reflections.
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Melbourne, AustraliaSo, are you suggesting that the direction pad on the remote does nothing?
My theory went more along the lines of, one IR transmitter allows the BladeStar to roughly know where the person with the remote is, the other one sends the forward / backward / left / right and throttle commands.
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United StatesOkay, I'm backing off on the theory of a propwash based object avoidance.
I'm guessing the directional control is based on knowing where the remote is (not too difficult if the spinning sensor only sees it half the time).
The control for "forward" would mean "away from the remote", and could be done by controlling the motors for half their orbit so that the rotor tips away from the remote. That would cause the BladeStar to move away from the remote, perhaps with a slight loss of lift.
The echoes of the old beam-bot photovore designs echo into that nicely. It would be a variant of a two motor system with two sensors controlling the motors. In the beambots, a sensor directly controlled one motor and a pair of these were wired up to make the beambot seek light.
Relying on this rotor tilting motor control for object avoidance, and for remote operation, would be in keeping with WowWee's style of doing more with less complexity.
I look forward to hands on reviews from community members within the month.
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Madison WI, United StatesNocturnal, is there an image that shows the direction pad on the remote? Or can you find a frame where someone is using it? (i just haven't seen it, so didn't think of that possibility.) I like the idea that one of the remotes lenses is to give an orientation to the Bladestar; that might fit in with the need to put a special fitting (lens?) on one side to do the combat. You know, when they showed the person holding up both hands to move the bladestar, there must have been someone else pushing on the throttle, off camera. You wouldn't be able to do that trick if alone!
And yes I agree, simple beambot. I suppose there's multiple ways of doing it; I was thinking a motor PWM signal NANDed with a pulsed IR reflection signal; or for the bottom sensor, both motors PWM ANDed with the bottom IR reflection to boost speed and get a bit of lift.
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Melbourne, Australiahttp://gossamer.open-site.org/robodance/flytech-bladestar-remote-large.jpg
I seem to recall something about the BladeStar having an autonomous mode.
The special lense will be to narrow the beam, to make it harder to hit the enemy blade star. (ie narrowing a say 30 degree beam down to a few degree)
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Madison WI, United Stateshm, thanks for that link, Nocturnal. Autonomous mode is sort of implied in the 'Meet the Bladestar' article, but not stated outright. And the control system is called '3 Channel digital proportional IR', maybe corresponding to up/down, forward/back and left/right. But I'd think you could do any movement in the XY plane with one channel, just by relative timing to when it sees the remote reference beam.
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Melbourne, AustraliaAutonomous mode has been mentioned in several place (the website call it autopilot mode). I seem to recall someone saying (I think it was Peter R), that for comabt, you put your blade star into autonomous mode and try to shoot down the enemy one.
from the website
Remote controller:
* 3 Channel Digital IR Proportional
* height / power
* forward / back
* left / right
I suspect it would only really qualify as 2 channel.
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Madison WI, United StatesAnd lets talk rotation speed. In the videos, you can see when it goes through 30 revs per second, and then keeps spinning up. So it's likely going between 30 and 60 revs per second? How much inertia do you think is in the motor core and prop itself? How quickly could the thrust be modulated in reality? Maybe that's an advantage of using tiny electric motors like are in the Dragonfly tail; too big of a motor and you wouldn't be able to control it quickly enough.
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Melbourne, AustraliaIf you REALLY wanted to kill the speed, reversing the motor would do it. Your right though, the larger you go, the more kinetic energy that will be stored in the propellor and rotor.
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United StatesYou're basing the 30 revs per second marker based on the sampling effects in the video frames?
Doesn't that presuppose the frame rates for whatever the recording device was for the videos?
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United StatesAs an aside for the folks tinkering in the back room on bigger and better BladeStar things, I've dropped myself from the access list for that group.
Keep the faith. Keep the concept. Come back into the light when you have something interesting to discuss, like this thread about the original product.
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Madison WI, United StatesMrScott said: You're basing the 30 revs per second marker based on the sampling effects in the video frames? Doesn't that presuppose the frame rates for whatever the recording device was for the videos?Yes, it's a total assumption. We don't know if they were using interlaced video or DV; what the lighting was (60 Hz fluorescent flicker can make some nice strobe effects.)., etc etc. If Nocturnal is right about the remote giving off a reference beam, then it'd be relatively easy (probably trivial) for the Bladestar to know it's revolution rate. That's the info you need, in order to tell the motor for how long to slow down or speed up, to get the movement desired.
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Melbourne, AustraliaThe reference beam is pure speculation. I have no evidence for it existance, other than its one way to determine RPM and control orientation.
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Nelson, New ZealandI love the debate, keep it up guys. I'm tempted to go with Nocturnal's theory at prestent though.
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Madison WI, United StatesOne alternative to changing the motor speed, would be to physically change the motor's radius of rotation. Move one motor outward by 1 mm for a fraction of a rotation, that'd slow it a bit and the torque would move the Bladestar one way. Or pull it in for a fraction of a second, and that'd speed it up. It's probably not a very practical idea tho, you'd probably have to use some kind of piezo actuator to move it fast enought.
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Nelson, New ZealandNot sure how effective that would be milw, one would have to test it, I think you would have to move it a fair way in and out to be effective. But a good idea though.
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