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Ardupilot- flying unstable planes?

Posted by Florin Mingireanu on September 26, 2010 at 6:38am
Hi there,

Assume you have a not very well balanced plane. Let's say it is tailheavy and it is almost impossible to fly it manually.
Would Ardupilot be able to fly it? Would it be able to compensate fast enough so that to keep horizontal flight?

Thanks!

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Replies

  • Vladimir Popov October 25, 2010 at 2:27pm
    It's a very complicated problem. Optimal autopilot gains must be very different in different airspeeds and attack angles. The plane-autopilot combination can be stable "in little" and non-stable "in-general". For the stable aircraft it is easier to discover universal values for almost all flight modes...
    Auto-gaining is a good idea, but it usually want some kind of Kalman filtering, which can be too heavy for microcontroller microbrain...
  • Developer
    Doug Weibel September 26, 2010 at 4:00pm
    Depending on how unstable, yes.
    Proper tuning will be critical and you may crash a lot before you find proper gain values for the airframe. However it has been demonstrated that you can stabilize an easystar upside down, which is an unstable attitude due to the dihedral.
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