The ThermoPilot project has been started in october 2010 and lot of real tests flights have been already done in summer/spring 2011 above the fields and also in high mountains.

The ThermoPilot v5.0 has been tested successfully in oct 2011 on a ASW-24 3m50 electro-glider with an ArduPilot Mega 2560 v1.4 IMU (phase 3).

The phase 4, now uses an APM v2 with the v2.28ThP5 firmware. My new firmware version uses a new algorithm (MLA) to do an accurate thermal hunting during a full autonomous cross country soaring mission of the glider.

I am using Xplane v9.70 as a test plateform in HIL mode because, it is able to reproduce with accuracy various weather conditions (thermal upwards, dynamic soaring, slope and/or ridge soaring) with real 3D mapped world...

More infos at:
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/arduplane-v2-full-autonomous-flight-hil-simulation-of-a-nimbus-4m