More flight videos
Ever since I achieved stable flight, I have gone outside for flight testing almost every day for the past week. Check out some videos after the break.
Ever since I achieved stable flight, I have gone outside for flight testing almost every day for the past week. Check out some videos after the break.
Or, the best one-line bug fix ever. For two months, I had been thinking I was running my flight controller at 166 Hz while actually running it at a measly 31 Hz. I don’t want to go into detail about how that happened, but I have fixed the problem, and now it works. I am [...]
Some systems can be controlled with a simple P controller, where a given offset is translated directly to some actuator output. Other systems, like the flight orientation control of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs), may require a damping term on the position to prevent a divergent oscillation of the vehicle’s angular position. However, the D controller [...]
My old implementation of the tricopter’s tail rotor yaw mechanism was a hack job. The yaw mechanism is arguably one of the tricopter’s biggest weaknesses with regards to ease of control. Most implementations that can be found online involve some combination of a servo and one or two ball joint linkages. I had used a [...]
My tricopter flies! Of course, I mean that very loosely, that it was airborne. Tuning the controller so the craft is actually controllable, however, is a task yet unfinished. In hindsight, my gains were much too low for free flight. Ground effect was therefore much more pronounced, and it took me a few tries before [...]
I changed how I set motor values (among other things) and invalidated my old PID gains. I figured out some new ones. Here’s a video of the current PID control behavior:
I thought it would be useful to have a way to test control of a single axis of the tricopter in a safely constrained manner, so I built a rig to do so: The rig is made of scrap aluminum I found in the room bolted to a cutting board that is clamped to the [...]
The I gain is zero for now, but basic attitude control works. In the video, I first change the attitude by slowly moving the joystick back and forth. At around 0:43, I move the joystick faster and let go to see how quickly the tricopter can stabilize. The P and D gains are a bit [...]
I’ve been working on stabilization code for the tricopter using direction cosine matrices but haven’t yet gotten too far because the DCM updates too slowly. I must be doing something wrong. For now, I’ve got basic damping (basically D control) using low-pass-filtered gyro outputs and some PID control that needs adjustment. Actually that’s a misnomer [...]