"I could imagine this being better for certain applications than a heli. To get a high forward speed with a heli, you have to tilt it forward a lot. Here, you just tilt the props, which lessens requirements on your camera mount."
"Aww, thanks for the long post. Sorry if I wasn't clear. I am aware of what the different components do, just wondered aloud why most guides mainly address the proportional part.
What are your thoughts on using fuzzy logic?"
"Why do pretty much all practical guides only address the P part of PID controllers? Is it that setting them up gives a good-enough response in real life?
Curt, I like your sim a lot and have been toying around with an autopilot (coupled to…"
"If you can, set up some smoothing on your throttle, so you don't go from full forward throttle to full backward throttle. Otherwise I could imagine quite a bit of stress on the prop, motor and motor mount."
"If you modded your EasyStar with ailerons, you can also do a controlled slip to slow down. Pull the ruder and use the ailerons to keep the wings horizontal. Or you can use your ailerons as speed brakes, but then you reduce your aileron travel."
"And atleast Paparazzi has a pretty good wind estimation, which might make it sufficiently precise for a soft landing. Cool stuff.
Geoffrey, how well does the OF algorith cope with flying above water or grass? I could imagine that it's a way too…"
"I wonder, could you come up with a clever way to use those to make landing smoother? Something about reading the apparent speed of the ground passing by (in pixels per second), comparing that to the actual ground speed, thus being able to measure…"
"Even though I don't know when I'll get to this (this is more of a side project), I will let you know. But I'm surprised that you aren't able to establish a tcp connection (which is streaming)... I know that some ports are blocked, but couldn't you…"
We are getting started with ArduPilot and a R/C car to slowly warm up to the autonomous stuff and getting acquainted with ArduPilot. So to keep costs low, we will use my rooted T-Mobile G1 to provide GPS coordinates, accelerometer data, to make a…
"The way I see it, Getting involved in ardupilot would mean getting involved in a autopilot project which aims to be the most lowcost of them all, which I think is exciting. But it still has to get quite a bit of polish (telemetry, ground station,…"
Are you going to pick Ardupilot with an IMU as a platform? Are you building one from scratch? I hope you know the Paparazzi project, which is already quite advanced and maybe more appropriate if you only have one summer?"
I recently talked to a geography professor about this and he really would like to see one. OTOH, he already did pay some companies to create an autopilot and they failed. The task was normal ardupilot stuff: keep height, fly over waypoints.…"