While rummaging around my hard drive I stumbled on some early footage of our Senior Telemaster flying. This footage includes some of my earliest successful autonomous flight using the original MNAV sensor head (now discontinued.) There isn’t anything especially great about this footage, other than I love the way the Telemaster looks in the air, especially it’s “scale” take offs and landings. These videos date back to sometime in mid-summer 2007.

The following movie includes some take offs, landings, and some early autonomous flight. One thing that is purposely highlighted in this video is an MNAV firmware bug that would cause the servos to go hard over full stop and send the UAV spiraling out of the sky. Fortunately we could quickly flip back into manual mode and manually pilot the aircraft to safety. Eventually I personally tracked down the firmware bug and fixed it. (Now we no longer use the MNAV in our UAV work.)

Here is a second movie showing a segment of successful autonomous flight.  The Telemaster is flying a bowtie — or figure 8 — pattern.  This is interesting to me because it offers a visual reference for the “quality” of our early MNAV based autopilot system that we can compare our current system against.