Bart Theys from the awesome vertiKUL team at University of Leuven that has been posted on here and here, was kind enough to share the code from his team's Pixhawk-based VTOL aircraft. He explains:
We used Arducopter and made a new flight mode we call ' cruise ' , this modes is the same as stabilize but when you turn a switch on the transmitter, the pitch angle gradually decreases over a period of 3 to 5 seconds. After this transition, the UAV maintains altitude and heading. The pilot ( or the traject generator ) can change the desired altitude and heading. The altitude is controlled by either increasing the thrust ( and thus speed, lift ) , or increasing the pitch angle ( larger angle of attack ). The second strategy still requires more testing.
We had a lot of help on the forum and the mailing lists, I was mainly Menno Hochstenbach who did the work on the controller, you'll find much information if you check his topics and questions ;)
Comments
could anyone compile the code?
From last year (aug 2014) anything new? (code wise)?
is it only for "tailsitter" or also for tilt-prop / fixed-wing configurations?
Is the transition done only with a switch command? can it be done by the pitch stick?
We have 3 flight modes:
stabilize ( like a quadrotor )
cruise: make a transition to forward flight, after that the pilot can control only the heading and the altitude. The controller controls the airplane yaw ( or roll for quadrotor) to change the heading and increases the thrust to gain altitude by flying faster.
Autonomous: trajectory commands are sent to the cruise controller
Looks like PX4 is no more supported for further development?
This is great! I hope this makes it onto the main firmware, I'd hate to see it languish in older firmware.
I have always wanted one of these: http://transition-robotics.com/
But the fact that it didn't run APM was a major put-off for me.
Do you have it flying autonomously? I'm guessing cruise is only manual.
How does it handle the yaw and roll axis being swapped?
Good challenge... Thanks a lot...
Has anyone gotten autotune + follow me + terrain following + VTOL transition + kalman filter simultaneously working in the same load?
Thank you for sharing.
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