Adaptive control: wing drop and engine failure

Martin Mueller December 1, 2010 at 9:17am

The adaptive control loop is not the standard setup for a Paparazzi fixed wing aircraft. It is in proof of concept state and it will need some more work to be flown on a day-by-day basis. Other aircraft types will have to be tuned individually.

It is not limited to the "wing drop", though. There was an unscheduled challenge of the adaptive control during the development/test flights at ENAC in Toulouse. We flew at a regular RC field with other manually controlled RC aircrafts in the air. We did not notice the severity of a mid-air collision with a glass-fiber aircraft until we had landed.

SilverFox November 29, 2010 at 4:59pm

Very cool, congrats!

Miles November 29, 2010 at 12:37pm

Any chance of APM getting access to the source code to complete this.

Ryan November 28, 2010 at 12:37pm

that is one impressive bit of software coding you have done there. It has taken major companies years to produce something like this and no you have made it available for home builders. Good work. Now I just need to see if I can get it and fit it to my twin engine aircraft for that "just in case" moment

Tad Pole November 27, 2010 at 12:17pm

Wait.. really? You did this on purpose? Tell you you are joking.

lionel November 27, 2010 at 9:34am

Really cool :-) can this be adapted to the APM. Without going to such extreme UAV reconfiguration in flight this can be very handy when one has to fly a payload which will change over the course of the flight

Martin Mueller November 27, 2010 at 4:27am

Everything you see is intentional :-) Maybe "simulated motor failure" would be more correct. The camera on the front boom is a FlyCamOne 3, the rudder/wing camera is a PMDV80 and the following aircraft has a GOPRO HD installed. The Twinstar/control loops do not only have to cope with the wing drop but with additional drag through all the camera installations. There is no additional software to the "normal" altitude loop for the motors. You can see the throttle slowly increase from 48% to 64% when the right motor is turned off. There is an additional control loop for estimating the needed roll offset to compensate the missing wing part and the unequal thrust. The code is in stabilization_adaptive.c. It has its limits for quick and sudden changes as you can see in the overshoot when the second motor is turned on again.