Altium Designer is being used to create the innovative electronics for a radical, autonomously controlled elliptical circular ‘flying wing’ for search and rescue work.
“Altium LiveDesign is a tool of empowerment for every aspect of FPGA engineering. FPGA-based systems that previously took us months to develop can now be done in a week. Altium Designer has saved my project and has put us back on schedule.”
William Rieken
Graduate School of Information Science
Nara Institute of Science and Technology
Japan
The Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Nara, Japan is dedicated to research and education which is focused on the development of society through the advancement of science and technology. This high level of emphasis on research is typified in the NAIST Graduate School of Information Science, where PhD candidate William Rieken has pursued ground-breaking research into an autonomously controlled Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that features sophisticated imaging systems designed for search and rescue work. The high-performance UAV is a radical Elliptical Circular Wing (ECW) design that houses an impressive array of complex electronics to support onboard video, telemetry and flight systems. Altium Designer has helped to put this complex project back on schedule, and allowed the PhD candidate and his student team to advance the design to new levels while significantly reducing development cycle times.
Key challenges
The ambitious nature of Rieken’s search and rescue UAV project was inspired in part by the tragic events of Japan’s 1995 Kobe earthquake, which caused the loss of more than 6000 lives and highlighted a need for quickly-deployed, vision-linked search and rescue systems that did not endanger the life of operators. Developing an airborne solution to this need has created significant challenges for the team due to the wide range of disciplines involved, plus the specialized software used to create key elements of the design. The project’s complex electronics, mainly involving FPGA-embedded systems employing advanced high-speed processing and control systems required a range of software solutions and compatible hardware development boards. In turn, these disconnected design solutions consumed substantial amounts of the team’s development time through limitations in both the hardware and software plus the difficultly in mastering the various design platforms.
Meeting the challenges
After looking into alternative electronics design solutions for his project, William Rieken was extremely impressed by the unique capabilities of Altium Designer – Altium’s complete electronic development system which includes the vendor-independent NanoBoard-NB1, Altium’s FPGA development board. Rieken and his team now use this system for all electronic development work. Altium Designer allows the team to complete all hardware, embedded and software design in one easy-to-use unified environment, then investigate and debug the actual results in real-time using Altium’s embedded test instruments and interchangeable daughter boards that house the latest FPGA devices – an easy process thanks to Altium’s LiveDesign methodology. The designers can now easily implement IP cores and source code directly into project FPGAs using Verilog, VHDL and C, and also at a schematic level with Altium Designer’s supplied IP logic blocks and processors.
The results
Using the Altium Designer complete electronic product development system, Rieken and his team have increased the development rate of the project while utilizing the efficiency of the solution to concurrently redesign sections for performance improvements. For example, the upload and download speed of the UAV’s onboard transmitter – comprised of FPGAs and a 1GHz DSP – will now more than double, while similar performance improvements are expected in the 1GB data rate of the system’s video engine backbone. According to Rieken, instigating FPGA embedded designs that previously took days or weeks to develop can now be completed in minutes, and the students in his team are so impressed by the convenience and speed of the LiveDesign approach they are now keen to port many of their own designs into the FPGA environment.
The final project is now a tangible entity; with prototype units now undergoing testing and soon to be test flown and video, telemetry, and flight control systems operational. In its final implementation, the team’s search and rescue UAV will feature a full 360º vision system created by processing video signals from a range of onboard cameras, high-speed data upload and download links, virtual reality flight control and observer vision systems, plus enhanced features such as automatic collision avoidance and a laser-guided landing system. The research project has created a high degree of interest around the world, and Altium is along for the flight.
About the university
Based in Nara, the capital city of Nara Prefecture in the Kansai region of Japan, the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) is a national university composed solely of graduate schools, and promotes advanced research and education in science and technology. The Graduate School of Information Science at NAIST promotes interdisciplinary research in science and technology through facilities such as their Image Processing Laboratory directed by Dr. Kunihiro Chihara, which features the state-of-the-art image processing systems and advanced computer technology used in creating the camera and virtual reality systems mentioned above.
For more information visit www.aist-nara.ac.jp and www.aist-nara.ac.jp/~rieken