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[Competition Requirements] [CR]Competition Requirements

📐 Architecture

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<Add diagram>

The architecture of a drone can be found in the [Competition Design Outline]. <# iterations> iterations of the drone will be created, at <#milestones>. <# final copies> of the drone will be created in “competition spec”. Our system will meet the requirements in [Competition Requirements].

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Cameras will be mounted outside the fuselage, one pilot cam forwards, one pilot cam downards, one cv CV cam downwards. The pilot cameras will feed into a 2-1 mux switch controlled by ZP before feeding into the VTX.

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Antenna Towers

The antennas ill will use directional antennas to improve connectivity with the drone, and must be placed as far apart and as high up as possible. They can be mounted on poles, and stakes may be driven into the ground with guylines to keep them upright (much like regular 5G antennas). Grounding wires can be driven into the ground as well. The towers should be as far apart as possible (one may have to be behind the tent and one in front of the tent - hence why it is important to get them to be able to go as high as possible), so that we have minimal interference. Even though we’re using different frequencies, they are still close to each other and notch filters may help significantly in signal quality, as will antenna separation. Antenna Towers should support fully tethered & fully untethered operation.

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The PX5 Will be set as a real time backup, as well as potentially act as a senor sensor readout. does the px5 need to be placed in the middle of the airframe for inertial computation to work? It has 3 imus, 2 temperature calibrated barometers, and will run it’s own sensor fusion algorithms and can act as a backup source of information for position, and a primary source of altitude information.

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Flight Stages

We can break the autonomous flight stages modes down into: Boot, Disarmed, Ground Ops, Takeoff, Cruise, Search, Landing, Operator Override. In each of these modes, the software will interact differently to accomplish the tasks that it wants. It is important to note that at competition, the drone should be able to go from boot → ground ops with user input (physical drone arm, controller arm, software arm), and then it should be able to fly autonomously for the rest of the competition (including going between ground ops and flight).

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In this state, all systems should be in low power mode in order to prevent overheating. To arm the drone…the drone, the following process should be followed:

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A waypoint is a GPS coordinate paired with an ID number. The ID Number describes the sequence in which the drone is to fly waypoints. ZP will string together all the waypoints to create a flight path, where the final waypoint is the “hover” point and the transition to Search mode.

GS will send updated waypoints for the remainder of the route on a reroute, with waypoint ID=0 being the current position of the drone. This means that on a missed communication cycle, or on an updated diversion response, ZP will be able to dynamically re-route from the last known position of the drone to the next target waypoint without missing a waypoint since it can understand which waypoints it wants to hit and which waypoints it wants to skip.

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• motor % values

• Setpoints from the controller

• current flight plan

• attitude

• battery voltages

• sensor readouts

• Mihir Gupta anything else?

Jetson

R D Anthony Luo Do we want Jetson active in this mode?

autonomous flight mode: Search

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GPS mode

The operator can override GS_SW sends to ZP that we have no more waypoints, and then ZP will request from the to send a new list of waypoints for a custom route. ZP continues to directly pilot the drone in this mode. Once the drone reaches the final waypoint, it transitions to Search mode as normal.

Autonomous flight mode: Search

When ZP has arrived at the last waypoint and there are no remaining waypoints to travel to, ZP will request from the Jetson where to go. During the flight, the jetson Jetson will be continually receiving position packets from ZP, and so it should be able to correlate known landing pad locations to waypoints as we fly over them. At the final waypoint, the Jetson will either direct ZP in a relative direction (e.g. 4m forward, 2 m 2m left) if it sees the landing pad, or it will direct ZP in build a spiralling spiral search pattern and direct ZP’s movement until it can determine the location of the waypoint.
To ZP, the data that is received is identicalsee the landing pad.

All direction commands sent to ZP are identical and include any direction in 3D space. The Jetson is responsible of keeping track of what general locations have been swept over using the position data, which includes altitude from the barometer.

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Autonomous flight mode: Landing

Once the Jetson determines a suitable landing location, it will direct the drone to be centered above the landing pad and then drop the altitude to 2m above the landing pad in a controlled descent. At that point, if Jetson sends a message to ZP acknowledging the position is good to land, ZP will use a variety of sensor fusion algorithms & the optical flow sensor to descend vertically over onto the pad .using a velocity controlled curve? Gordon Fountain (Deactivated)

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There will be a few distinct flight modes, each of which handles a portion of the flight. In each flight mode, the drone will process the controls differently.

GPS

Gps GPS mode means that the drone will fly to a position that you specify. This can either be a gps GPS coordinate, or it could be relative coordinates that the drone well then rest at. This is how waypoints will be handled, and this is likely how most of the flight will be conducted.

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LEVEL

Level LEVEL Mode means that the drone will self stabilize, but it will continue flying in the direction that you specify. Generally, this means that stick inputs will translate directly into a correspondent angle on the aircraft. This is likely how pilot manual flying will work.

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ACRO

Acro ACRO mode means that the controls control rate of rotation. It is unlikely that we will ever need to use this mode with a quadcopter, but it is possible that we will use this mode when doing an emergency takeover of a fixed wing aircraft to put it into a glide slope.

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struct JetsonToZpMovementCommand {
  float x;
  float y;
  float z;
  float heading;
}

Logging on ZP

Logging will be done using an SD card. It will either be on an SPI-Based carrier board or using SDMMC on the L5 pins directly. The former will be used if we fly on a nucleo, the latter will be used if we fly on zp.

Stanley Tang maybe add some more info on how logging might work?

Logging on Jetson

Log data on the Jetson will be recorded to the SD card containing the operating system.

🚀 Deployment Milestones

Fall 2022

• ZP flying on acro ACRO mode fixed wing & level LEVEL mode quad

• ZP communicating with ground fully

• Sensors ready to work

• !?!?!?!?!??!?!?!

• Nov 28: initial frame delivery & initial software delivery

• Dec 20: See software-hardware integration, put in orders for everything that we will need for the next 4 months.

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