| Hey that's neat. I worked on something similar back in 2009/2010. <http://bardagjy.com/?p=614> We used a G1 dev phone to fly a 1.5 meter wingspan airplane. We used only sensors in the phone, camera, gps, etc. Honestly it didn't work too well - we needed either a much better model of our airframe, an airspeed (not groundspeed) sensor or an airframe that could power through 10-15 mph winds. In the end however, we demoed waypoint navigation and imaging the waypoint. You text it lat/long and it texts back a picture. We did it as a proof of concept (for an interested govt agency), modern smartphones are neat, but bespoke, real-time hw, with navigation grade sensors are probably an order of magnitude more effective (though an order of magnitude more expensive). Working with android to do robotics was.. interesting. We had to do all sorts of hacking to make the phone behave a little as possible like a phone and more like a real-time controller. What do you do when someone calls the phone while you're flying an airplane? How do you keep the phone application from taking over and exiting out of your navigation app? While the airplane is 1000 ft in the air? |
What I ended up using for the ground/water stuff was sending serial commands out of the headphone jack... surprisingly low latency, especially compared to bluetooth, and it was only a few bytes at a time so low baudrate was fine.
http://robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?n=Main.AudioS... Here's the source and schems if anyone wants them -- the idea here was to make the hardware as light as possible!