JAviator - overview

The JAviator project is a collaboration with the University of Salzburg to create a quad-rotor autonomous helicopter controlled entirely with our Metronome- and Exotask-based Java technology.

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First All-Java Flight on Metronome

On October 4, 2006, the JAviator team made the first flight completely controlled from the Metronome-based Java virtual machine. An Atmel-based microcontroller on the helicopter reads sonar and gyro sensor values, sends them via serial link to a Linux system running the JAviator control software, written in Java. It send motor control values back to the microcontroller which generates the PWM signals for the motors.

To see the JAviator in action, you can watch the movie.

The JAviator team after the first successful flight of the JAviator using all Java-based control software running on top of Metronome garbage collection (4 October 2006, Salzburg, Austria).
From left: Rainer Trummer (U. Salzburg), Josh Auerbach (IBM Research), David Bacon (IBM Research), Harald Roeck (U. Salzburg), and Christoph Kirsch (U. Salzburg).