This is a flight demo of the recently released MatrixPilot 5.0flying the helical Turn algorithms by William Premerlani.
MatrixPilot is a relatively small open source GPL v3 licensed Autopilot, which provides a platform for DIY enthusiasts to experiment with new algorithms and ideas. It does not have a large user base, partly because any change in it's configuration requires a recompilation of the code. The official announcements for this 5.0 release is on the uavdevboard discussion list.
Unreliable. Dangerous. Unpredictable spinning knives. Accidents waiting to happen.
Imagine selling a lawn mower with no protection for the spinning blades.
Class actions must surely follow against the manufacturers.
A Demo of Helical Turns with an EasyStar in HILSIM / X-Plane 10 from Pete Hollands
A few days ago William Premerlani posted the theoretical maths behind a new control algorithm for MatrixPilot called Helical Turns.
This post shows a practical demonstration of flying MatrixPilot Helical Turns using an Easy Star in Hardware In The Loop Simulation (HILSIM).
Hi Folks, I've been working on sonar for a few weeks and I made 6 landings yesterday as shown in the Video above.
The detailed specification of the Maxbotix MB1230 is here.
The processing of the Sonar information to do some simple filterering is done here.
The Logo Flight plan is shown here.
Best wishes, Pete
What's going on here? This is a "Virtual Venice UAV race". It's based on the DIYDrones T3 figure of 8 competition.
The screncast's purpose is to show how pilots can potentially fly their planes in different parts of the world, and then have their geo position and time base altered so that they end up racing side by side in Google Earth.
My spoken commentary is complete fiction. I just wanted to create the human emotions that a race meet, can engender. (I actually flew the same planes somewhere near Reading in the UK on two different days).
Now, using the latest flight analyzer, any group of MatrixPilot's can have a race together, although they may actually be on opposite sides of the world. In the future, all MAVLink compatible UAVs shoud be able to do this as well. (Someone still has to develop the software).
diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/restarting-the-t3-contest-now-with-copters
code.google.com/p/gentlenav/
MatrixPilot 3.1 is released. The project continues to mature, with a fantastic IMU that is still moving ahead with deep research from William Premerlani. Ben Levitt continues to add amazing features such as the built-in firmware for the OSD hardware that can be attached to the UDB3. This means the UDB3 can display it's internal thinking (such as next target waypoint, direction of next target, and maximim G-force being pulled) onto the video screen of the pilot.
Anyway here is a quick summary of the latest changes ...
There is a lot of talent and development occuring around MatrixPilot at the moment, and I look forward to working with all the newer developers to integrate their new features into MP over the next few months. Thanks everyone.
Best wishes, Pete
Reduced Yaw Drift / Fast Gyro Sampling with the UDB / MatrixPilot from Pete Hollands .
[Note: Apologies for the low sound volume in this video. Please turn your volume up.]
This is a demonstration of the reduced Yaw Drift which is possible when sampling the gyros at 30,000 times / second (Thanks to William Premerlani for this R&D and code). Using QGroundControl and the MatrixPilot MAvlink implementation, I show a real time graph of the resulting negligble yaw drift in the UDB IMU.
In the demo I do refer to the accelerometers quite a bit. I should really have been focussing on the gyros. It is the high sampling of the gyros, and the integration of the resulting data which leads to the low yaw drift. So please ignore my comments about the accelerometers.
Demonstration uses Revision 790 of MatrixPilot_mavlink branch at this address
code.google.com/p/gentlenav/
Testing a DIYDrones magnetometer in HK's GCS from Pete Hollands on Vimeo.
I test the DIY Drones magnetometer ( HMC5843 magnetometer breakout board ) using Happy Killmore's Ground Control Station connected using SERIAL_UDB_EXTRA telemetry format, to a UAV DevBoard V3 running
MatrixPilot (revision 729 of trunk).
photos:
picasaweb.google.com/peter.hollands/Twinstar2Build#5547623052830239122
UAVDevBoard / MatrixPilot:
code.google.com/p/gentlenav/wiki/Home?tm=6
HK GCS:
code.google.com/p/happykillmore-gcs/
DIY Drones Store:
store.diydrones.com/HMC5843_Triple_Axis_Magnetometer_p/br-hmc5843-01.htm
Self Calibrating Mathematics, and software to integrate via I2c written by William Premerlani:-
diydrones.com/profile/WilliamPremerlani
Source Code:
code.google.com/p/gentlenav/source/browse/trunk/libUDB/magneto_udb.c
Matrix Pilot Camera Targeting: Tree Test - Software Stabilized
Strategy: Have MatrixPilot / UAV DevBoard (UDB) point camera roughly in the right direction.
Take out the jitter movement using software stabilization.
The above flight was flown on a day with 10mph of wind, with a lot of turbulence (I included the landing in the video to show the turbulence).
1. The UDB is calculating its orientation 40 times / second using a 16 bit Direction Cosine Matrix
2. I use se Bill Premerlani's "High Bandwidth Dead Reckoning", which means MatrixPilot knows it's
absolute position 40 times / second, by integrating the accelerometers. The accelerometer positions are
corrected by allowing for the GPS delay and some of the GPS dynamics (GPS info arrives at least 1
seconds after the real event).
3. The camera code computes the target location from the above 40 times / second.
Camera Targeting with UAV DevBoard
Converting Telmetry for Google Earth Analysis - Part 1
from Pete Hollands on Vimeo.
Converting Telmetry for Google Earth Analysis - Part 2
from Pete Hollands on Vimeo.
