[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
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