FreeSpace Autopilot Crash!


I rarely crash. Maybe I've been lucky? I had been ignoring a bug for the longest time only to have it occur just as I was over the trees ready to land. There was no time to recover.

Toward the end of the video you can see the crash. The plane is trying to follow a runway beam but winds up oscillating back and forth and eventually tip stalls. The only thing that saved me from ending up on the roof of the barn was accidentally flipping on the autopilot for 1/4 of a second as I was in a panic flipping every switch.

My beamfollow is what I suspect caused the crash. It works like this:

1) The "beam" is created and basically defines a path to follow. It is assigned a bearing.
2) I get the distance from the aircraft to the beam. 30m out the bearing command is perpendicular to the beam. As the aircraft gets nearer and nearer, the bearing command converges to the actual beam bearing
3) The aircraft follows the beam bearing by feeding the bearing error into the bank command (The aircraft simply banks toward the bearing)

If the aircraft is going decently fast, there aren't any issues. But something oscillates when I go slow, and especially when I just hover in the wind making no progress as in this video.

So the two bugs are:

1) Beamfollow oscillations induced by low airspeed
2) Altitude was lost making all the turns, making recovery impossible.
3) Probably flying 30 feet above the treetops in gusty winds made for all sorts of funky air currents.

I've learned 2 things from all this:

1) Don't ignore strange behavior. It WILL happen near the ground one day.
2) FAILSAFE MODES! Plane should recognize dangerously low altitudes or oscillations and enter a wings level climb and alert the user.

The damage? Stripped aileron servo gears, Cracked left aileron, busted pitot tube, chipped prop, and a few cracks on the fuse. She'll fly again in a few weeks!
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Comments

  • @ken - No, that's a cheap chinese camera... it never holds the correct date/time.

    @Ryan - I agree. It seems that the key is that you can't bank as much for slower airspeeds, and that since the radius of your turn scales with velocity^2, you just scale down your max bank with airspeed. It's unintuitive to me, since most gains scale down as you INCREASE speed, not the other way. This is definitely the first gain that doesn't follow that rule that I've come across.

    Thanks for pointing me at that post! Seems like I'm running into a similar issue.
  • Developer
    http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/improved-heading-controller

    You have to have lower gains for lower speeds. There are a couple of ways to pull it off, but I like my method.

    -Also, it looks like your attitude estimation was the problem. It starts to diverge it seems like?
  • I noticed that the date showed 2008. You've been traveling back in time?
  • @Curt- Yeah I love New Hampshire! This time of year people from Massachusetts drive up special to become what are known as "leaf peepers", sometimes driving 2 hours to simply look at trees. I used to think it was odd.
  • I have to comment that your fall colors are awesome!
  • After some more thinking, I think this may simply be a case of banking too much at just above stall speed. Perhaps limiting banking to a lower angle with slower airspeeds is the way around this. Turning radius increases with the square of velocity, so I should be able to achieve the same turning radius at a slower airspeed with less bank. Well, that and don't set your cruize airspeed just above stall in gusty winds :)
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