At the recent LCA'2014 conference in Perth I gave a couple of talks about research projects I'm working on with ardupilot. These show a couple of the things that we are working towards with APM.
The first is a talk on differential GPS which is part of a collaboration between Ben Nizette at ANU and myself.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl8aJlG52PE
Slides: http://uav.tridgell.net/LCA2014/dgps.pdf
The second talk is about the research project to run ardupilot directly on embedded Linux boards, which opens up some really interesting possibilities for APM:
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ealH3qP_pBE
Slides: http://uav.tridgell.net/LCA2014/AP_Linux.pdf
These projects are really just a small part of what we are working on, but I thought a few people might be interested in them.
Cheers, Tridge
Comments
Awesome work Tridge, particularly on the DGPS, I'm really looking forward to seeing the result! I've also been playing around with a BBB based autopilot - you can see a brief glimpse of the cape I'm using in this video, you may find the Simulink part interesting too. As you highlighted, one of the challenges one faces with a Linux based autopilot is the hard real-time requirements necessary for hardware interfacing. I ended up putting a microcontroller on the cape to facilitate this.
the gumstix line of boards are indeed very nice, and small! However for an initial port with the same set of autopilot features as the Pixhawk the BeagleBoneBlack with a cape seems an ideal target. I suspect that once we have that flying that people will port ardupilot to other boards (I have it running on a RaspberryPi for example).
One of the things we plan on doing with this Linux port is auto-detecting sensors where possible, and making it easier for people to control the startup to use the right UARTs and other devices for their boards.
There are heaps of great embedded Linux boards available, and I'm sure that if the BBB port is a success that others will follow.
Cheers, Tridge
Hi Tridge,
have you checked out the gumstix overo line yet.. and is your source archive for APM on linux available on github yet for others to play with??(gumstix owners fer instance :)
The cosmic+ module that tim references above is also fascinating.
Reaon for my interest in gumstix is because of both global shutter cam boards and sensors with external lensing availalble for same(say for glyph base navigation(hmm 10 ft on a side QR codes?)) and the navstik.org people have a direct plugin interface to the gumstix overo line...
They also run NUTTX and APM and have proven willing to put the crypto variant of the ARM4 chip on the FC board.
just something to think about
Great presentation Tridge.
Regarding the from a Linux perspective, troublesome usec signal (PWM) range. If you have constant >1 usec variation in a servo PWM signal this would no longer be considered signal jitter, and instead become servo chatter. With servo chatter the servo motor is constantly moving back and forth, leading to excessive drain and worst case servo motor/driver burnouts. A hardware driven PWM signal (commercial receiver) typically will have jitter in the <10ns range.
Freescale is incorporating ARM A5 Cortex and ARM M4 Cortex in one chip to help address some of the issues of general OS and realtime integration. Board: http://www.phytec.com/products/single-board-computers/Chip: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=VF6xx
Also, here is an interesting read: http://lwn.net/Articles/572740/
very excited with all this new things coming up...I have learned a lot by watching this conference. thanks a lot
Excellent talk! Really got the gears spinning...
I did not bored any second of the presentation port to linux it was awsome. Thanks.
Great talk Tridge!
Very interesting and educational. Just learnt a lot!
Thanks!
I enjoyed the talks Tridge, thanks! Can become very interesting for direct georeferencing of images taken from a UAV if IMU precision enhances!
-
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
-
5
of 5 Next