Ardupilot for use in soaring guidance and control

Has anyone done anything with the Ardupilot or simular for autonomous guidance and control of gliders?. To be able to find and use thermal to your advantage and keep the glider aloft as long as possible. Seems like it may be posible but I'll have to give it more thought.

I did find the attached paper from NASA titled "Guidance and Control of an Autonomous Soaring UAV"

On page 9 of the PDF (page 5 of the actual document) there is a nice block diagram that gives the top-level overview, and describe the concept of Total energy estimation. This seems key to any type of soaring application.

Anyone up for writing some code ;-)

-John

Guidance and Control of an Autonomous Soaring UAV.pdf

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Ritchie September 9, 2010 at 5:15am

Well as Magnus said in his APM testflight the motor was throttling and turning off when lift was found. Presumably a few bits of math to help the current code and you would be off. However i think finding the thermals is the priority as happening on them is ok but you wont be able to soar indefinitely otherwise.
Daniel Nugent March 31, 2010 at 7:56pm

I'm planning on doing that. My guess is it would be fairly easy to program. When I get to it which will be who knows when I'll let you know. It might be like six months so I would do it on Your own if I were you.

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Ardupilot for use in soaring guidance and control

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