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Daedalus Human-Powered Aircraft
Instrumentation |
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The
M.I.T. Daedalus Project was building a human powered aircraft
to duplicate the flight of Daedalus from the island of Crete
to mainland Greece, a distance of sixty-nine miles. They
had started the design of an automated flight computer (autopilot)
to help free the pilot from the moment-to-moment control
of the aircraft but did not have the technical resources
to complete the project on time. The autopilot system consisted
of pitch and roll sensors, an airspeed sensor, a heading
sensor, a fluxgate compass, an altimeter, an analog computer
and a display computer. |
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System Overview
Bolton Engineering undertook the design, construction
and testing of two pieces of the autopilot system: the pitch
and roll sensors, and the display computer. The electronics
had to be both small, lightweight and low-power.
The pitch and roll electronics integrated the output from
rate gyroscopes to generate pitch and roll signals. Chopper-stabilized
techniques minimized drift due to offsets and temperature
drift. A custom miniaturized multi-output DC-DC converter
was designed to power the rate gyros and rate gyro interface
from the aircraft bus 5V supply.
The display computer was constructed around a single-chip
microprocessor (80C31), an analog-to-digital converter,
an LCD driver, and a lightweight Polaroid plastic LCD. The
sensor inputs were digitized, averaged, scaled and displayed
on the LCD to create an artificial horizon bar graph, a
pitch bar graph and a digital airspeed display. An electroluminescent
backlight provided easy readability under a variety of ambient
light conditions.
Results
- Delivered rate gyro and display subsystems four weeks
after the start of the project.
- Performed extensive testing to validate the performance
of the sensors and system; a ten page report was written
to describe tests performed.
- Display software required no changes after it was transferred
to Daedalus
Project Scope
Bolton Engineering designed, tested and constructed the
rate gyro interface board and the display computer board,
wrote the software to drive the airspeed and pitch/yaw display
and submitted a report on system performance. |
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