Developer Comment by Mark Colwell on June 26, 2010 at 6:08am

I have wanted a UAVDev board AP for some time now, after Bill P's and your great Auto landing flights. I will commit to getting one. Great Work!

Comment by mmormota on June 26, 2010 at 6:26am

Great results!

What is the firmware version?
What is that PCB near the Lipo?

Jozsef

Comment by William Premerlani on June 26, 2010 at 6:44am

Hi Ric,

Wow, I am impressed. Thank you so much for achieving these flights. I have a pretty good idea of the level of your accomplishment in setting up the controls and tuning the gains without crashing. Plus, it does take some courage to just "let go" and go autonomous for the entire flight.

I am curious about one thing: did you have dead-reckoning turned on or off? The main reason I implemented dead-reckoning is that it seemed to me to be the only way that the waypoint turning controls could be stabilized at high speed. So, dead-reckoning reason for being is your Funjet. I am hoping it made a difference, but I don't want to fool myself.

Also, did you have cross-tracking turned on or off, I would be curious to know about that.

Finally, are there any videos? If so, you could enter the T3 contest. Even if you do not, I am sure that the folks who are following the contest thread would be interested in your accomplishment, so I am going to post a link there.

Best regards,
Bill

Comment by William Premerlani on June 26, 2010 at 8:07am

Hi Ric,

Just for the fun of it, I made pictures of your two landings, shown below. I noticed that in your first flight that your FunJet did an "automatic go-around" the first time it was coming in for a landing. How cool that you arranged your waypoints so that it could do that. I did the same thing during my practice runs at 50 meters height, but during the final runs at 0 meters, there were too many trees too close by to be able to do that.

Once again, thank you very much, Ric.

Best regards,
Bill

Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on June 26, 2010 at 8:27am

I don't think video evidence is absolutely vital for the T3 peoples word that the task was completed should be enough along with KMLs!! Video is another layer of difficulty when already doing a difficult thing! Well done Riccardo, the DevBoard is truly a cool piece of kit. Following the email list as I do the commitment of all involved in the DevBoard is obvious

Comment by Michael Zaffuto on June 26, 2010 at 8:49am

@mmormota, pcb near the LiPo is the microSD OpenLog board from SparkFun.

http://code.google.com/p/gentlenav/wiki/OpenLogConnection

Comment by ionut on June 26, 2010 at 11:19am

I'm curious why you need the magnetometer?

Comment by ionut on June 26, 2010 at 11:20am

Also, I don't want to post a new blog entry.Anybody tried for autonomous flight solar panels like this one?
http://www.aurinco.com/pvbw020_en.html
It seems like a cool feature

Comment by William Premerlani on June 26, 2010 at 11:44am

Ionut,
The magnetometer simplifies autonomous takeoff, because then you do not need to do anything special to initialize the yaw gyro.
Also, there is a feature of MatrixPilot that Ric uses from time to time: vertical hovering for extended periods of time in stabilized or waypoint mode. That is a situation where GPS will not provide yaw information.
Aside from the reasons that Ric has for using the magnetometer, there is also a version of MatrixPilot that helicopter pilots are using, in which case a magnetometer is a must.
Ric likes to be on the cutting edge, he helped me test and debug the magnetometer.
Best regards,
Bill

Comment by ionut on June 26, 2010 at 1:41pm

Bill,
Do you think this autopilot can land an airplane with landing gear on an airstrip?Is seems like autolanding is more about bringing the plane on the ground than a smooth landing...

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