My Flying Wing UAV platform

[lukasz]

Tom are you analyzing those xml files in Excel or just by viewing those files?
Generally I'm analyzing flight data in excel, but wonder if you have any tool for this.

[Tom]

Usually I open them in gluonconfig and if I don't see it by a quick look, I make some graphs in Excel (eg desired roll vs roll or pitch angle versus height)

[lukasz]

ok, generally I analyze this in Excel.

Generally I look at barometer high + desired high.
Same for Pitch and Roll

[lukasz]

Just today I did some flying on Beta Firmware.
I'm quite impressed and works quite good.

So far I managed to test Circle, Climb and FROM_TO_ABSOLUTE Navigation commands.

One thing I noticed that after flying couple of circles in AP with full engine power the AP has a tendency to stop circling and flies away in not defined direction - this happened couple of times.

Started investigating this and so far I didn't manage to find the cause.
Could it be that I don't have any material that would absorb vibrations from the engine and this somehow disrupts gyroscopes?

I also noticed that when flying in stabilized mode just after the take off the plane is vary stable but after couple of minutes of flight (with mid to full engine power) it starts doing uncontrolled things - rolls to one wing or pitches up (even does loops). When i switch to manual mode, turn off the engine, glide about 10-30 seconds and switch back to stabilized mode all comes back to normal. Would this indicate that Engine vibrations disrupt Gyroscopes?
Do you use in your UAV platforms any absorption materials between the module and mount?

Also I have a question regarding Cruising speed (under Control tab) is this working in Beta version?
I have played with it and didn't notice any impact on flight speed.

[Tom]

Hi Lukasz,

Cruising speed is only used when you loose a GPS lock.

What your descibe there is very abnormal. It might be vibration, but I screwed my module directly to the frame of the funjet without any to absorb the vibrations. So far not a problem at all. Nobody reported this as a problem to me either... Can you send me the xml datalogging file?

[lukasz]

Your funjet is fully made from styrofoam so this might absorb some vibrations.

My plane is made from styrofoam but is fully covered with balsa so the vibrations might be bigger.
I have attached xml file from one of my last flights:

04.10.2010_12AP.rar

(89.07 KiB) Downloaded 1122 times

You can see on it that at one point the plane flights away in AP mode.

And here is the kml file:

04.10.2010_12_classic.kml

(153.48 KiB) Downloaded 1152 times

[Tom]

Hi Lukasz,

I finally had time to review your datalogging:
- You switched fast to AP, and it circled 6.15km without any problem. You didn't configure the altitude hold, so the plane kept climbing

After this I see some "less-normal" things, but they didn't last long enough to really analyse it. The pitch angle was very steep, and the speed became low (10km/h). Did the plane stall?

Tom

[lukasz]

I did about 10 flights that day and had couple abnormal behavior so can't recall this.
It might be, but at the moment I can recall this.

Attach you will find another log file where in one flight I had such situation twice.
Maybe it will be better than the previous one.

09.10.2010_3.rar

(118.92 KiB) Downloaded 1165 times