Hey everyone,

Just to introduce ourselves, we're CUAir, Cornell's Autonomous Aerial Vehicle team. We've been working with the ArduPilot for the year, switching over from a commericial autopilot. Most of our work is going into designing a new web based ground station (which will be available at the end of this year). I'll be mostly talking about our work so far with the ArduPilot, what we've learned, and what it's like to try to perform a full autonomous mission with a mid-size aircraft carrying semi-expensive equipment and flying in 10-15mph winds. 

To give a little background, we compete in the AUVSI competition. I won't go into details here, but you can checkout more here. 

Our plane is design to perform autonomous takeoff with a pneumatic catapult and autonomous landing using deep stalling. The complex part is that we test at a grass airfield, therefore the landing must be very exact - even our pilot has trouble landing at the airfield with a mid crosswind. 

We have been testing the autonomous landing capabilities of ArduPilot with this size plane on the small runway, and it's been going very well so far. We haven't performed a full landing yet, but the approaches have been very nice.