[NSRCA-discussion] Could this allow automated scoring?

Sun May 10 14:59:00 AKDT 2015

Hi all...yes I'm still lurking!

A friend of mine actually was the design engineer of the first ground based GPS system ( LOCATA Corp) he is quite a propeller head!! The CEO of Locata and I also go back a long way. Locata is based here in my city. BTW for all you music lovers, Frank Gambale is Nunzio's brother.

http://www.locata.com/

Maybe I can ask Gavin to design something for us 'normal' people. He actually fly's as well...so I am sure he will be interested! He could probably do this in his sleep-he is waaay too smart for my liking!!! If I could only get him to fly pattern, he just seems a little too busy on all the Top Secret work he does!

Tom

From: NSRCA-discussion [mailto:nsrca-discussion-bounces at lists.nsrca.org] On Behalf Of John Gayer via NSRCA-discussion
Sent: Sunday, 10 May 2015 3:47 AM
To: Daniel Underkofler; General pattern discussion
Subject: Re: [NSRCA-discussion] Could this allow automated scoring?

Ground based GPS augmentation systems exist and have been tested. However, I haven't heard about anything in our price range. Typically in an airport environment, the ground based transmitter is broadcasting corrections to the satellite signals rather than an imitation satellite signal.
Standard micro GPS probably wouldn't know what to do with this signal. Also the ground-based xmitter is not sized/priced for us.
However , it may not be necessary to go that route. If we could improve on the 3 meter accuracy a bit and the 10hz update rate and expand the storage capacity....

But rather than auto-judging, setting up a display showing the plan view and vertical view graphically, perhaps with color shading to indicate deviation from roll angle = 0 in realtime would be an incredible advance in practice/coaching.  Think about it.
In a square on corner, you would see directly the effect of the top corner roll attitude being off 5 degrees and where that took the third leg.

John
On 5/9/2015 7:07 AM, Daniel Underkofler via NSRCA-discussion wrote:
It's great to see technology like this approaching for at least partial automated judging.

Seems that resolving the altitude component adequately is the largest challenge.  To address this, I had envisioned a local set of 3 "beacons", each emitting GPS-like signals that are received and processed by a transponder in the model.  Yeah - expensive and even more out in the future.

In the short term, using high resolution and update GPS to resolve XY location might be useful for partial judging.  Human judges would still be responsible for the majority of the scoring, but a "correction factor" for XY errors might be factored in.  For instance, it is terribly hard to judge the geometry of the horizontal triangle in F15, but given good XY data, a portion of the score could be addressed.  Distance and  parallelism to the runway could also be determined and factored in (somehow).

Dan

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 9:33 PM, John Gayer via NSRCA-discussion <nsrca-discussion at lists.nsrca.org<mailto:nsrca-discussion at lists.nsrca.org>> wrote:
The judges are expected to consider the track of the plane in an earth coordinate system. For example the judges are supposed to consider that a 45 degree climb appears steeper at the end of the box than it does in the center. So the track should be analyzed by the judges in an earth coordinate system and the track of the model rather than attitude.

The location of the pilot is actually irrelevant but the location of the box is clearly of critical importance. Knowing the actual location of the plane with a fairly quick update rate is critical. At 120 feet/sec(approx 80 mph), horizontal position is no problem. At this speed you need an update rate of about 80 milliseconds to get a data point about every 10 feet. Not sure how good the GPS update rates are these days but this should be achievable. IF the altitude update rate is too slow then augment with an altimeter. Since we are downloading this data from the model, roll attitude could be transmitted as well for wings level.

We would still need a zero judge for snaps, spins and stall turns and to establish when the pilot is lost in a maneuver. It might be necessary to have an "advance to the next maneuver" switch for that case.

It would actually be a fascinating project to download accelerations, roll, yaw and pitch rates for analysis while observing snaps visually to see if standards could be established about what is a snap and what isn't.

John
On 5/8/2015 1:24 PM, Peter Vogel via NSRCA-discussion wrote:
Not by itself.  Judging/Scoring is from the perspective of the pilot + judges, not from the perspective of the plane.  (As opposed to IAC, where it's from the perspective of the pilot in the plane).  For it to be done right you'd need to know the precise location of the plane and the precise location of the pilot, then calculate the geometry of the plane's movements relative to the perspective of the pilot's location.

The SoloShot 2 automatic cameraman does close to what we want in tracking the movement of the plane relative to a ground station, but from that you'd still need to calculate geometries, and wings level, etc.

Peter+

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 11:44 AM, Keith Hoard via NSRCA-discussion <nsrca-discussion at lists.nsrca.org<mailto:nsrca-discussion at lists.nsrca.org>> wrote:
Cheap, Centimeter accuracy GPS<http://goo.gl/mZg6RG>.

No more complaints about biased judging?

-Keith Hoard
klhoard at hotmail.com<mailto:klhoard at hotmail.com>

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