Just wanted to say thanks to the developers bringing this product out. I love it.
Today I felt lucky and went to the field for my second ever flight with ardupilot wired to a custom made fixed wing platform for some testing. Since the first flight I connected the pitot and the Xbee at 2.4 GHz for telemetry.
I was feeling that lucky that decided to try the auto take off, On my previous only flight I only tried manual, circle mode and RTL which seemed to work reasonably well, sure lots of potenital for PID improvement.
So I planed some waypoints inlcuding take off and landing, Set the mode to auto and ...it is a miracle the plane took off (it is a trike setup) run fairly straight on the grass took off and gradually climbed ( I should remember to increase the maximum pitch angle as currently set to 14 degrees only- but better be safe). It was climbing slowly straight away from me going past the first two waypoints but that was due to having to reach the alt at which take off is complete, I had to hold my nerve for a bit cause it flew at least 1km away. Then turned back and completed a circuit of 8 waypoints. It only missed one of them and had to bank steeply to re-get it ( a bit of adrenaline rush there). but other than that pretty spot on especially for a first time circuit.
For some reason it didn't want to land and I couldn't understand what it wanted to do after getting the last turnpoint before landing. I couldn't understand looking at my laptop which was the current waypoint target either, so I switched to manual and brought it down.
Marvellous stuff guys and thanks so much for getting this out to the masses.
The next thing I want to do is try to get the plane to take a picture when it reaches a waypoint, ideally I would like to use the IR control camera shutter library for this too, as the goal is to use the setup for aerial photography.
Great
Comments
Another good day at the field, where I had 4 successful auto take offs.
One comment regarding take offs for fixed wing models, It seems that during take off there needs to be more stabilisation on Yaw axis, currently for all my take offs there wasn't sufficient stabilisation especially during the pick up speed, I think extra gyro stabilisation to keep whatever heading the plane starts take off is necessary.
I also tried auto landings, with more success this time. a comment here is that I think there should be a landing specific pitch angle, I feel the cruise speed pitch angle is for most airframes not appropriate for landing approach, ie there needs to be more pitch up on landing.
Another thing about landings, is that once the WP before the landing WP is reached and the throttle is off for landing there isn't sufficient Yaw control to maintain heading, this is paramount for auto landings.
Also head the chance to try failsafe from loss of radio.
Cheers guys
PS trying to improve navigation since last flights excellent performance I think I over did it with PIDs :( , broke the basic rule of one thing at the time I guess. Some snaking from one WP to another but no biggy, think will reset and start from there.
Ooops, Yes sorry wrong log:
here are the tlog and rlog from the other day:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B07f-MuLfSBFQXppQWN2U3B4Wjg
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B07f-MuLfSBFX201b3hOWGROeFU
Thanks
Hi again,
I think that must be the wrong log. It only includes the APM booting, and then in manual mode, no auto at all.
Could you also send the mission file?
Cheers, Tridge
I don't see a tlog?
cheers
Great! I'm always delighted to see posts like this.
If you post your tlog we may be able to work out why the landing didn't work as expected.
Cheers, Tridge