Release 3.0.1, 17 June 2016

The ArduPilot development team is proud to announce the release of version 3.0.1 of APM:Rover. This is a minor release with small but important bug fix changes.

The two main motivations for this release
1. Fixing the arming for skid steering Rovers
2. Fix to the rover steering that should really improve steering of all rovers.

Skid Steering Arming

Fixed arming for Skid Steering rovers. You should now be able to arm your skid steering rover using the steering stick. NOTE skid steering Rovers - you will not be able to disarm. The reason for this is zero throttle full left turn is a perfectly valid move for a skid steering rover as it can turn on the spot. You don't want to be executing this and have the rover disarm part way through your turn so we have disabled disarming via the steering stick. You can still disarm from the GCS. Thanks to Pierre Kancir for working on this.

Improved Steering Control

For historical reason's the steering controller was using the raw GPS data for ground speed without any filtering. If you have every graphed this data you will see on a rover its very spiky and all over the place. This spiky'ness was feeding into the lateral accel demand and causing inaccuracies/jitters. Now we using the EKF GPS filtered data which is much smoother and accurate and the steering control has greatly improved.

Improved Cornering

Previously when corning we didn't take into account any "lean or tilt" in the rover - we assumed the turns were always flat. We have changed this to now take into account any lean so turning should be more accurate. Boat users should really benefit from this too.

MAVLink2 support has been added

See this post by Tridge -

http://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/mavlink2-is-in-ardupilot-master/9188/1

The other changes in this release are:

• setting your sonar_trigger_cm to 0 will now log the sonar data but not use it for vehicle avoidance.
• the throttle PID is now being logged
• range finder input is now being captured (thanks to Allan Matthew)
• added LOG_DISARMED parameter
• merge upstream PX4Firmware changes
• numerous waf build improvements
• numerous EKF2 improvements

Thanks to everyone who helped on the release.