[Canberrauav] SkyWalker APM search at CMAC today
tridge at samba.org tridge at samba.org 
Tue Apr 26 20:20:42 EST 2011 

After helping out with the laying of the new runway, Jack and I flew
the SkyWalker at CMAC both yesterday and today. You can read about the
flights on Saturday here:

  http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/transmitter-failure-but-apm?xg_source=activity

the problem we hit was that my transmitter failed, although that did
result in 2 perfect fully-automatic landings!

Today was much more successful. Jack brought his transmitter/receiver
which we fitted to the SkyWalker. After a bit of setup work for the
new transmitter we flew as follows:

1st flight:

 - takeoff in fly-by-wire mode
 - switched to GPS loiter, worked well
 - landed in fly-by-wire mode, good landing

2nd flight:

 - takeoff in fly-by-wire mode
 - switched to GPS loiter, worked well
 - switched to full auto, and flew a "mow the lawn" 18 waypoint search
   pattern over CMAC

The plane flew beautifully and the APM behaved perfectly. The audio
feedback from mavproxy was really useful (it called out the waypoint
numbers automatically during the flight for example). The wind was
quite strong, and the SkyWalker coped well, although its speed upwind
was affected quite a lot. From the GPS log, the upwind speed in auto
mode was around 21km/h, whereas the downwind speed was around 48km/h,
which means we were fighting a 27km/h wind. The upwind track ended up
with a lot of curves in it, whereas the downwind tracks were fairly
straight.

Tracks for the fully automatic part of the flight are here:

  http://samba.org/tridge/UAV/SkyWalker/logs/2011-04-26/f2/CMAC-search.kml
  http://samba.org/tridge/UAV/SkyWalker/logs/2011-04-26/f2/CMAC-search.gpx

The planned search pattern is here:

  http://samba.org/tridge/UAV/SkyWalker/logs/2011-04-26/f2/CMAC-search-plan.gpx
  http://samba.org/tridge/UAV/SkyWalker/logs/2011-04-26/f2/CMAC-search-plan.kml

as you can see, the wind really pushed it off course!

There are a few photos here:

  http://photos.tridgell.net/v/CanberraUAV/SkyWalker/

and a video of the auto-search here:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUr55J0T4_Q&feature=channel_video_title

We're now planning on adding the pandaboard and ptgrey camera this
week, and we will try a search pattern with the camera in the
SkyWalker next weekend. That will give us the image data we need
combined with full telemetry (attitude, GPS, altitude etc) to get back
to the image processing and 'find Joe' task.

Cheers, Tridge

Copyright 2011 http://canberrauav.org.au/