So, the weather finally cooperated for the first time in a long time so I took my small delta wing out to see what I needed to do to get it ready to fly in Auto mode.
In manual mode, everything was fine as expected. It's been a while since I last flew it so it was nice to get out and fly again.
1) In stabilize mode, it worked like I expected. I could let go of the sticks and it would level just fine. I noticed that I had to fight it some when I wanted to do a turn. Is this normal? It just seemed like I had to fight it a lot. I would assume that it would just be like manual mode unless I let go of the stick. I think it may just be that once I have the plane banked into the turn, I naturally move the stick back to center as it will keep rolling otherwise and that may be why I feel like I'm fighting it. Is that correct?
2) Also in stabilize mode, I found that if I fly the airplane and then force it upside down, it corrects itself quite well but it doesn't really right itself and rocks back and forth for quite a while unless I take over. It doesn't seem to rock much when I'm just flying around let go of the stick but mainly when I go inverted and let go of the sticks. Is this just too much for it to handle or could I turn down the P term slightly? I don't plan on flying upside down much wanted to see how it would react.
3) In Fly-by-Wire B mode, I found that it will bank about 35-40 degrees when I go left but when I go to bank right, I only get about 15 degrees or so. How exactly do I rectify this issue? The XY sensor seems fairly level and I can't really adjust that any further. I see the most recent thread about XY sensor tuning and maybe that's the key but I wanted to make sure before I start making changes.
I only plan on making one change at a time to see how that affects it as I know changing more than one makes things difficult to test out later. Once I get this rectified, then I'll test the pitch in FBW B and then move to FBW A, RTL, Loiter, and then full AUTO. This is getting to be exciting that I'm making some progress now that weather will be okay here. Too bad for rain all week.
Any help would be great!
Replies
Your observation about "fighting" against Stabilize mode is normal. ArduPilot is always trying to level the plane, even if you want to be banked. You may find flying in FBW-A much more pleasant - I do.
The oscillation after a large disturbance can usually be tuned out with the P and D gains.
The difference in left and right bank amounts could be due to your radio setup, or to your XY sensor setup. For your radio work on your mechanical linkages so that you are close to in trim without any trim from the transmitter, then re-run the radio setup for ArduPilot. For the sensors the easiest way to debug would be to use telemetry while flying manually and see if your sensed bank angles correlate with your actual bank angles.