Comments

• Admin

  Thomas J Coyle III June 9, 2013 at 6:27pm

  @Tridge/Chris,

  I am presently near St. Louis, Mo and will be home by Tue afternoon.

  I want to thank everyone who assisted in this victory for the ArduRover team at the Sparkfun AVC. I do not believe that anyone person alone could have pulled off what our team was able to accomplish at the AVC.

  Next year I plan to fly as this three day drive is murder without someone to ride shotgun.

  I hope to enter an improved Slash rover and a Traxxas 1/16 Rally which will use a PX4 FMU and I/O.

  Regards,

  Tom C
• 3D Robotics

  Chris Anderson June 9, 2013 at 3:45pm

  It was a great day for Team ArduRover and Tom was absolutely beaming. He's got a long drive back to Florida to savor the victory, but the lesson here was that hard work pays off. Huge thanks to Tridge, Tom and everyone else for bringing this code up to contest-winning quality over the past few months. Next year, we can add vision, Lidar, DGPS and more and become unbeatable. 
• Developer

  Andrew Tridgell June 9, 2013 at 3:40pm

  Huge congratulations to Tom Coyle for winning the Sparkfun mid-size Rover category at Sparkfun AVC on the weekend! Tom has put a massive amount of effort into testing the APM Rover code, and it really paid off for him. I haven't yet found a video of his run, but from what I've heard his rover managed to get through the barrells, through the hoop and over the ramp to produce a winning score.

  Hopefully when Tom is back home (it's a long drive!) he will write up the full story.

  Cheers, Tridge
• 

  Mike Wilson June 7, 2013 at 6:37am

  @Tridge,
  
  Thanks for the info. I'll upload the latest firmware and give it a try.
  
  ..Mike
• Developer

  Andrew Tridgell June 7, 2013 at 12:53am

  @Mike,

  I forgot to mention that there is a simple workaround for the bug. Just change the value to something else first - for example, change it to 0.1, write the parameter change, then change it to 0.0. It will then work.

  Cheers, Tridge
• Developer

  Andrew Tridgell June 7, 2013 at 12:26am

  @Mike,

  It's a bug which I fixed a few days ago. I plan on releasing a new rover version soon with the fix, but meanwhile you could load the 'latest' version from firmware.diydrones.com and that has the fix.

  Cheers, Tridge
• 

  Mike Wilson June 6, 2013 at 10:31pm

  @ Tom or John,

  I'm trying to set the Steer "D" values to zero but for some reason, the APM is not accepting the settings and they go back to 0.2 if I disconnect and reconnect to the APM.  If I write the parameters and then do an immediate read, the values are correct but if I do a disconnect and reconnect, the values are back to their default.

  Am I missing something or is this a bug?

   

  ...Mike
• 

  John Hestness May 30, 2013 at 8:34pm

  @MV,

  Unfortunately I did not save my parameters, but I believe they are the default parameters except the heading2steer and servo2steer, the "D" I changed to zero.  I have some other experience with tuning and it seems that the D parameter is not often needed.  I watched your video, your rover is running great. I look forward to hearing and seeing more.

  @Mikel-Ange,

  I think you are right, we need to build drones/rovers/robots that do real work. This is my real motivation behind the hobby.
• Admin

  Thomas J Coyle III May 30, 2013 at 12:36pm

  Hi All,

  Today I verified John Hestness' observation that setting the D (derivative) of the two steering PID control loops to zero did indeed stop the jittery rover steering.

  Regards,

  TCIII
• 

  Gary McCray May 29, 2013 at 6:09pm

  @Jared,

  Really nice design, stairs are a serious problem, great solution.

  I am looking at similar electronic design to yours and am hoping to use PX4 as controller although it is a bit light on IO.

  Another interesting possible option that I am also considering is a USB multiaxis (up to 9 axis) CNC controller from Planet CNC, they have a ton of IO and are set to handle Steppers (which I plan to use) as well as encoder feedback.

  I am thinking of using Fit PC2i in same location as yours (with Kinect) although there are some other SBPCs I am looking at too.

  The APM2.5 has quite a large amount of general purpose IO, but the APM software may not be ideal for you.

  The PX4 supports the APM software, but it also independently supports ROS which would probably be better and easier to integrate with your FIT.

  The Planet CNC controller has its own CNC G-code interpreter built in but comes with an SDK that will let you dial your own responses.

  Here's a copy of their manual:

  http://www.planet-cnc.com/files/CNCUSBController.pdf

  The biggest problem I see is that you really need to combine the capabilities of Windows, Ubuntu Linux and ROS (at a minimum) to make this a reasonable undertaking.