Hi!
I just bought a Hercules Pusher 63" flying wing and intend to fly it autonomously by using my Pixhawk/PX4 autopilot. However, I have no experience with flying RC planes which makes the tuning of the controller rather difficult. I've decided to try to do some tuning in a simulation environment (X-Plane 10) instead by Hardware-In-the-Loop simulation (HILS). Is this a valid approach or is it necessary to the tuning by flying for real in manual mode? I do realize that by using a simulation environment the tuning will be far from perfect, but could it be enough to perform an auto mission?
Furthermore, I'm using the QGroundControl with Pixhawk/PX4. In QGroundControl you have the option of choosing different airframes. For the simulation airframe I think I have to choose the HILstar even though I have a flying wing. But for real flight I can choose between five different flying wings, what is the difference between the airframes? Can I use either one assuming that I change the tuning parameters (FW)?
Replies
There is an onboard tuning mode available in APM so best thing would be to get somebody that can fly to fly and then autotune. You would be well served to learn how to fly though and make sure your airframe is correctly set up to fly without an autopilot if you want to avoid wasting money in senseless crashes.
I'm using the PX4 flight stack and to my knowledge there is no fixed wing autotune mode for that? Now that I think of it, how do you tune without flying autonomously in PX4?