My Flying Wing UAV platform

[lukasz]

Hi,

It took couple month of hard work and couple of days of ground testing till I performed first flights of my flying wing platform.

After Performing couple of Manual flights where I did the trimming and gluonpilot configuration I decided to test stabilization and "come back home" functionality.

Result is just brilliant!
Here are couple of photos of my plane:

1.JPG (214.71 KiB) Viewed 240218 times

2.JPG (236.47 KiB) Viewed 240218 times

Here is the flight path:
- Stabilized flight

stabilized_1.JPG (246.23 KiB) Viewed 240218 times

[lukasz]

-Stabilized Flight:

stabilized_2.JPG (221.18 KiB) Viewed 240217 times

- "come back home":

come_back_home_1.JPG (251.98 KiB) Viewed 240217 times

come_back_home_2.JPG (250.85 KiB) Viewed 240217 times

[Tom]

Congrats on your first flights!
That's a very cool looking wing indeed!
This is another very fast integration that shows the easy-to-use potential of the gluonpilot module.

Could you add the KML files of your last fight?

I added a new battery to my funjet which allowed me to climb at a rate of 3m/s. After 7 minutes of flying it was no longer visible
Turning off the motor, waiting for 5 minutes, still nothing... Pitching down (this works in autopilot mode with the latest firmware) and another 5 minutes later: there he was, back from 900m altitude

Autopilots are so much fun!

[lukasz]

Hi Tom,

Here you go:

01.08.2010_7.kml

"come back home" flight

(111.3 KiB) Downloaded 29705 times

I just need to figure one thing. During "come back home" navigation the plane was flying in nice circle and suddenly at one point it tilled to right wing and started to fall down. I managed to quickly switch to manual mode and recover the plane.
The situation can be seen in attached KML file:
Point: 22
Latitude: 52°20'32.20"N
Longitude: 21° 3'0.66"E

screenshot:

sudden_fall.JPG (108.01 KiB) Viewed 240208 times

I would need to go through the logs and check if i can figure out what was the issue.
Later during same flight I switched once again to AP and done almost a full circle on AP.
It was late that day, could barely see the plane and decided to end flying for the day.
Will do some more tests this week

[Tom]

Yeah, happened to me too. Usually it goes like this:
(1) plane sees just enough GPS satellites
(2) plane having a rather steep roll angle
(3) loses some of the satellites
(4) Not enough satellites
(5) Bad position/speed reading

Can you add the xml loggings as well ?

[lukasz]

Tom, uploading of xml files is blocked.
Could you enable it?

[Tom]

Strange... I changed some settings, can you try again?

[lukasz]

I receive following error while adding xml file:
"The upload was rejected because the uploaded file was identified as a possible attack vector."

I packaged the file using rar:

_01.08.2010_7.rar

"come back home" xml log

(80.76 KiB) Downloaded 25133 times

I think we need to implement some kind off fallback when there is a lost in satellites.
The plane should than use readings from gluonpilot and switch to stabilized flight.

I will try to analyze what happen at that point viewing attached xml file.
If you find anything than let me know.

[Tom]

In v0.4 there is an option "cruise speed" which is the GPS speed that will be used when there is a bad GPS signal.

I see two things:
* The pressure sensor had a bad reading.
* I don't think your pitch calibration was very good. Did you have to pull up during normal stabilized flight? As you can read in the blog post, the gyros can be calibrated in the field in version 0.4

[lukasz]

Thanks for tips.

I will look into this.

To be honest, during stabilized fight i didn't see the need of pull up as the flight looked very straight.
I'm using version 0.3 for both Gluonconfig_v0.3.zip and rtos_pilot_v0.3.zip .
The original calibration of the sensors was done on a flat table
I might need to do the calibration in the plane. Also I need to find the angle at which the plane flies straight.

I see that you uploaded newer version in the download section. What are the changes?
What has been fixed or what is new.