Made a video of my testing today including autonomous MISSION with 2.0.46 (version from the zip file in the download section).
Stabilise was excellent as always, except maybe for a little to big dead band on yaw. Indoor I could takeoff and fly maybe half a minute before I had to touch the sticks.
Sonar althold worked excellent, baro alt hold was a little less precise, but seemed better then in previous versions. I had the new experimental althold with accelerometers enabled.
Simple worked excellent, even in a metal hangar.
Loiter flew around in a 10m diameter circle at first, but that got better when I lowered loiterP a bit. (0.8 in stead of 1.0)
RTL was odd. About 60% of the time it would work perfect. The other times it would seem to work ok, returning home as expected, but when it reached home, it would hesitate for a very brief moment and then take off again in the same direction it was travelling to get home. It would just continue it's course, after a very short hesitation at home position. I let it go for 30-50 meters, but never any sign of comming back. You can see it in the video below
Auto worked nicely too. Had following mission planned :
The copter flew nice and smoothly to waypoints 1,2,3 and 4 with respect for the different heights. It tracked real straight to my eye, a big improvement since previous time I did auto missions.
However when reaching waypoint 4 it didn't land there, it went for waypoint 1 and wanted to land there.
Travelling between waypoints was smooth, but at the waypoints the copter could sometimes turn or tilt a little bit aggressive. Nothing to worry about, just not as silk smooth as the moving between waypoints.
Unfortunately no logs, since my dataflash seems to be corrupt and my apm hangs if I compile with logging enabled.
But here's a video, showing it all :
It's also nice to see what happens when the battery is empty !
Enjoy !
Replies
Jason found the issue causing the RTL to sometimes not stop when home was reached and it should be solved in 2.0.47 ! YAY ! The arducopter software just got better again :-) Way to go !
I get a lot of requests for my pid's. They are the standard pid's as set in the firmware, except I lowered loiter P from 1.0 to 0.8. In the new version 2.0.47 Jason lowered it further to 0.5.
I don't have a standard frame (selfmade hexa frame with 29cm arms, nor standard motors or esc's. I believe the keys to getting a stable and good flying copter are :
1) Get rid of vibrations on the imu. I have rubberpads where the arms connect to the centerplate, the mount for the brain is on threadrods with silicone tubes and the brain itself is mounted on a foam pad. Furthermore props and motors are balanced as good as possible.
2) Make sure your frame is straight and true and that motors are mounted straight up.
3) Reduce electronic interference, especially for the sonar. I believe it also might help to put esc's on the arms instead of right next to a microprocessor and sensitive sensors. Esc's are a major source of electromagnetic interference.
4) If you have all the above, then you shouldn't need too much adjusting of the pid's, unless you have a much heavier or powerfull copter or a mini copter.
Just my 2c after 9 months of arducopter testing. Hope it can help all those with less stable copters.
Unfortunately no logs. My dataflash seems corrupt, if I enable logging, the apm won't initialise and gets stuck on the start_new_log() function. Also if I go into logs with CLI, the APM hangs.
If mission planner logs are also usefull, I have wireless telemetry installed, but didn't have the laptop on during the testin above. I could try to redo the RTL tests if mission planner logs are also good, but not yet very familiar with the mission planner telemetry logs.
Thanks for the kind comments ! I'm glad to contribute something back for the tremendous work that's been put in this project for free.
Excellent flight, excellent video; excellent simple clear editing; I learned stuff, thx !
Wow nice video!
and nice flight too.
Now,what're you tuning PI loiter and NAV_P and I , show me please
Hello,
I got a chance to test 2.0.46 (Git Version from Saturday). The last version I have used was 2.0.44 which worked extremely well for me. Here is the little test report for 2.0.46:
Loiter worked ok but I have seen better performance in earlier versions. One thing that was really strange is that after a while of being in loiter alt-hold started to perform really bad. At first I thought it was due to sensor noise / temp drift so I landed, recalibrated the sensors (disarm / arm of motors) and tried again… same behavior.
Second test was guided mode. I still don’t understand what orientation the copter takes when flying to a waypoint. It is neither pointing to the waypoint nor is it point to a constant heading either. But anyways traveling to the waypoint works great. Once it reaches the waypoint however the copter turns by 180 deg and flies away from the waypoint. First I thought this might be an overshoot error but it just keeps flying away. Shouldn’t the copter switch to loiter once it reached the anticipated WP? I guess this is the same thing you saw on RTL.
I have a two logs attached with several loiter attempts which all show the mentioned behavior. It also happened once, that suddenly all motors shut off while in midair dropping the copter from about 4-5m altitude. Luckily no damage but I was not able to determine the cause of it. Maybe someone sees something in the logs and can give a hint.
Thanks for the great work and the progress in every version.
-Niklas
2011-10-02 11-59 24.kmz
2011-10-02 11-59 24.log
2011-10-02 12-00 26.log