I have finally written up an article on our successful Outback Challenge 2016 entry

The members of CanberraUAV are home from the Outback Challenge and life is starting to return to normal after an extremely hectic (and fun!) time preparing our…

The ArduPilot development team is proud to announce the release of version 3.7.0 of APM:Plane. This is a major update so please read the notes carefully.

The biggest changes in this release are:

• more reliable recovery from inverted flight
• automatic IC engine…

ArduPilot has been able to use X-Plane as a HIL (hardware in the loop) backend for quite some time, but it never worked particularly well as the limitations of the USB interface to the hardware prevented good sensor timings.

We have recently added the ability to use X-Plane 10 as a SITL backend, which works much better. The SITL (software…

The ArduPilot development team is proud to announce the release of version 3.6.0 of APM:Plane. This is a major update so please read the notes carefully.



The biggest changes in this release are:

• major update to PX4Firmware code
• major update to QuadPlane code
• addition of MAVLink2 support…

As mentioned on the 3.5.2 release discussion we have decided to do a 3.5.3 release to fix a couple of important bugs found by users in 3.5.2.

The main motivation for the release is a problem with flying without a compass enabled. If you fly 3.5.2 with MAG_ENABLE=0 or no compass attached then there is a risk that the EKF2 attitude estimator may become unstable before…

The ArduPilot development team is proud to announce the release of version 3.5.2 of APM:Plane. This is a minor release with small changes.



The main reason for this release over the recent 3.5.1 release is a fix for a bug where the px4io co-processor on a Pixhawk can run out of memory while booting. This causes the board to be unresponsive on boot. It only happens if…

If you have visited ardupilot.com recently you may have noticed you are redirected to our new documentation system on ardupilot.org. This is part of our on-going transformation of the ardupilot project that we announced in a previous…

The ArduPilot development team is proud to announce the release of version 3.5.1 of APM:Plane. This is a minor release with primarily small changes.



The changes in this release are:

• update uavcan to new protocol
• always exit loiter in AUTO towards next waypoint
• support more multicopter types in quadplane
• added support for…

After the unfortunate crash of our last QuadPlane build with a failed ESC CanberraUAV wanted to build a new version with more redundancy in the VTOL part of the build. The result is the above OctaQuadPlane which we successfully flew for the first time yesterday.

When we…

The ArduPilot…

Not all of the adventures that CanberraUAV have with experimental aircraft go as well as we might hope. This is the story of our recent build of a large QuadPlane and how the flight ended in a crash.

As part of our efforts in developing aircraft for the…

The ArduPilot development team is proud to announce the release of the 3.5.0 version of APM:Plane. There have only been a few small changes since the 3.5.0beta1 release 3 weeks ago.

The key changes since 3.5.0beta1 are:

• addition of better camera trigger logging
• fixes to override handling (for users of the OVERRIDE_CHAN)…

The ArduPilot development team is proud to announce the release of the first beta version of the 3.5.0 release of APM:Plane. We think this is going to be a great release and we'd love some feedback before we do the final version.



The biggest changes in this release are:

• switch to new EKF2 kalman filter for attitude and position estimation
• added…

The upcoming 3.5.0 release of APM:Plane includes support for QuadPlane - a hybrid plane/multi-rotor that allows for high speed long distance flight with vertical takeoff and landing.

The above video shows a converted HobbyKing Firstar 2000 doing a fully autonomous mission, with VTOL takeoff, followed by automatic transition to fixed wing flight and then a…

The ArduPilot development team is proud to announce the release of version 3.4.0 of APM:Plane. This is a major release with a lot of changes so please read the notes carefully!



First release with EKF by default



This is the also the first release that enables the EKF (Extended Kalman Filter) for attitude and position…

Anyone who has been involved in aeromodelling for a while dreams of having one of those days when everything works right. It doesn't happen often, but when it does it sure is nice!

CanberraUAV had one of those days yesterday. It was a wonderful sunny winters day at our …

APM:Plane 3.3.0 released



The ardupilot development team is proud to announce the release of version 3.3.0 of APM:Plane. This is a major release with a lot of changes. Please read the release notes carefully!



The last stable release was 3 months ago, and since that time we have…