Background & History

“Attitude Manager” is a module that directly controls the current state, or attitude, of the aircraft. It exists as a FSM and is directly responsible for giving motor output targets to Laminar OS.

Historically, AM has run on the “safety” chip of ZP-HW, however, since 2021, ZP has been shifted to a one-chip model, and so AM has been ported to run alongside PM, TM, and SF. It has been adapted to fly fixed wing aircraft, quadcopters, and in its most recent form, hybrid vtol aircraft.

Architecture & Design

Attitude manager exists with 8 states, each of which handles a distinct state of control. AM also ensures that any fatal failures lead to a disarming and flight termination of the drone, as well as ensuring that there is no output when the drone is in a disarmed state.

Instructions can be received from TeleOperator (i.e. user radio over RC-Link), or from Path Manager. AM offers three types of control:

• acro or direct flight, useful for limp mode in fixed wing aircraft

• stabilized flight, useful for operator control in general purpose remote operation

• autonomous flight, useful for flying autonomously when receiving instructions from PM.

The state machine is as follows (nice diagram soon):

Following WARG rules, we have “modes”, and inside of “modes”, we have “stages”. This leaves us with the following architecture (we are missing a box around runControls and outputMixing).