AP-Manager is a board available now that allows switching between two Pixhawks or APM autopilots:
Product Description
The requirements for the operation of unmanned aircrafts in commercial and semi-professional purposes have changed fundamentally in the past years in Europe and worldwide. ( FAA ) The regulations will get even more strictly in the future.
Depending on the application, the weight, the purpose, the situation, the flight area, spectators and some more reasons, SAFETY is becoming increasingly important.
Single point of failure and redundancy became the keywords for permissions and certifications from authorities and insurances.
Among other parts inside a system, redundancy of the autopilot system is meanwhile mandatory to follow the rules. Especially multicopters are very instable in their flight characteristics when it comes to malfunction of the stabilization system.
We therefore developed a redundancy circuit board which is an automatic monitoring and controlling bridge between two independent running autopilot systems, a mutual protection in case of malfunction in an autopilot system. Even if both autopilots fail (power supply, freezing controller…), the forwarding of the control signals for a manual flight of the aircraft, Delta or Helicopter is guaranteed.
This system also offers the possibility to switch manually between two different autopilot systems to test different software and sensor setups. Another benefit of the AP-Manager is that only one telemetry module is needed to monitor data of both autopilot systems (except for DJI autopilots, here you need two downlinks, from each autopilot seperate).
AP-Manager is a safe attendant for flying and testing of your unmanned aircraft.
Comments
As far as I understand the device, the AP Manager itself is can be considered as a single point of failure. It adds another PCB, plus lots of additional cables, all of them can fail. So where is the improvement in redundancy or reliability?
@Billy, you could use it in combination with the Millswood failsafe. They you have Diversity Diversification.
I do not want to pee on the parade but this board does not bring a redundancy solution to the needed real encountered redundancy problems of Ardupilot hardware and software, because it is unable to define which ardupilot provides the correct outputs. It only detects the presence or the absence of an output or in other words if an ardupilot is alive. This is a never encountered issue.
To make it useful, a more sophisticated board is required which will compare different signals logically ( not only at hardware level) between a minimum of three ardupilot boards. In aviation rules redundancy even requires a comparison between 5 boards to allow for two failures to be detected.
So who switches the switcher in case the switcher goes bad?
LOL. Fixed!
Is this second post for redundancy too...? ;)
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