In case you missed it, some great news items in the last couple weeks, from the Ardupilot development powerhouse:
- Release of Copter 3.5
- The Solo lives on
Copter 3.5 is a major release with an extensive list of new features and improvements, including support for visual odometry, obstacle avoidance, RTK GPS, dual GPS blending, non GPS loiter and navigation, improved autotune.
More specifically, AC 3.5 new features and improvements include:
- Performance improvements including 8kHz IMU sampling for improved vibration resistance, greatly reduced latency between IMU updates and motor outputs
- AutoTune with position hold if entered from Loiter/PosHold flight modes (wiki28)
- Delivery improvements including Servo Gripper17 and Package Place
- Driver additions and improvements:
- Improved Smart Battery support (individual cells voltages, battery serial number, Maxell battery driver) (wiki25)
- OLED Display51
- Lightware LW20 lidar37, all lightware products can now use I2C interface5.
- TeraRanger Tower29 lidar for Object Avoidance
- Maxbotix sonar serial interface now supported
- Garmin Lidar-Lite v337
- Landing gear retracts/deploys on startup only after pilot moves transmitter switch
- Flight controllers supported now includes:
- The Cube30 (aka Pixhawk2)
- Beagle Bone Blue26
- improved Intel Aero RTF support (ArduPilot is included in Intel's next software release)
- AUAV2.1
- PixhawkMini support
- GPS improvements:Mission fix for Turn-towards-next-waypoint-too-soon issue (only applies to AUTO flight mode)
- Here+ RTK GPS33
- Piksi Multi RTK GPS18
- Dual GPS Blending (wiki30)
- Non-GPS loiter and navigation:
- Object avoidance:Precision Loiter using IR-Lock (wiki18)
- Pixracer10 improvements:Solo supported (we recommend upgrading flight controller to a Green Cube23 from a HEX reseller8)
- ESC calibration fixes
- board LEDs now work
More information on Arducopter 3.5 can be found here.
Copter now also supports the Solo, a first. Detailed information can be found here: The Solo Lives on
Also stay tuned for the upcoming release of Arduplane 3.8, whose list of new features and improvements promises to be just as impressive as those of its Copter sidekick!
Comments
Jose: Cheers!
Credit of course goes to the 20+ strong core Ardupilot team and Arducopter lead developer Randy Mackay, the hundreds of beta testers (11 beta release candidates over a six month period) and the tens of thousands of professionals and hobbyists making up the Ardupilot community.
A few interesting statistics, looking at the greater picture: Over 300 developers have contributed to Ardupilot in the past years by submitting accepted code pull requests, while the project has been forked over 5000 times.
Since the beginning of this year Ardupilot has witnessed an average of over 400 patches/pull requests from about 30 contributors each month, affecting on average over 20,000 lines of code. (Latest development report can be found here). Meanwhile more than 13,000 mails (notification when a user is participating in a support thread) were sent last week from Ardupilot’s discuss server, and conversations on gitter channels average several hundred a day. Productive and busy!
As far as using the SF40, it was supported in copter 3.4 prior to 3.5, check this part of the wiki. And congrats for Quaternium’s Hybrix, awesome copter!
Hello Olivier,
I see many interesting things !!! Congratulations!!!
All this object avoidance features are very interesting, a lot of people ask about this features.
I would like to ask about something that is not on the list: Randy has a video where he has installed a LightWare SF40?, is it on the roadmap?
As you know we are convinced to use ardupilot in our 20kg hybrid multicopter. A few days ago a customer visited us to see a flight demo, they have two helicopters of € 100,000, During a flight they sent a flight plan on the fly and the flight controller was reset and everything fell to the ground.
In my opinion the reality is this, some 10000€ are not as tested as the ardupilot and have absurd bugs.
To compare with any other military grade autopilot it only needed a aluminum enclosure and military connectors, it is our solution, there are a dropix inside.
Great job guys,
I will be getting a Cube for one of my Solos.
I've got to see for myself what you have accomplished.
Best regards,
Gary