Brief
This is the second ZeroPilot sync meeting in preparing for competition in early May 2023. The goal of this meeting is to set the minimum viable product from a controls and data perspective as well as the possible tiers of progression that are realistic before this upcoming competition.
The previous sync covered all active competition efforts and is documented ->2023-03-14 Meeting Minutes - ZeroPilot Sync
Attendance
Topics
Minimum viable product assuming no autonomy points (Just aircraft flying)
Required subsystems, testing, and integration plan
If we wanted some autonomy points, how do we get them
The rules read through was on Monday so hopefully we have some idea here
list out subsystems and testing plan to correspond
Notes
Minimum Viable Product for competition 2023
Running Ardupilot as is currently used on Cornflakes
Mission planner replaces IMACS GUI
Tracking antenna replaced with running omni-antenna’s on tripods for IMACs
PPM out of RFD direct to Pixhawk Ardupilot
Mav-link direct to mission planner
More information regarding VTX specifically 3-21-2023 ICARUS Sync
Everything denoted here has been tested in flight tests
Minimum Step for flying ZeroPilot
Only advantage of doing this is we get more auxillary functions
fancy lighting control
fancy beepers
PPM passthrough would need to be tested and validated before ZeroPilot can be flown
Three or four flight tests are needed so this cannot happen
We have not flown ICARUS yet as well
Test PPM passthrough
Flight modes, decoding, & re-encoding logic
Test Mav-link
Houston Test
Fixed Wing Plane
Guided Modes
Cornflakes Test
Mav-link & PPM can both override each other so that can be used for testing one at a time
Mission planner and RC controller always has full control when using ZP passthrough
Next it to check telemetry and ground to mav-link and back
IMACs needs to be able to send and receive for this functionality to work
CV has no way to read codes and don’t have integration to path finding processes
There’s no guarantee we’d get the autonomy points because IMACS needs the integration
Doing this option opens us up to autonomous points (without autonomy having to rewrite drivers)
ZeroPilot will not be flown at competition 2023 for the above reasons
We will use mission planner
IMACs cannot send relative motion commands because mav-link does not support it. They might be able to send precise GPS coordinates, but of course this requires testing.
Jetson will consequently not be flown as well at competition 2023
Autonomy integration to mission planner
This could be done to salvage our ability to get some autonomy points
This will be saved for IMACs sync for more details
IMACs sync will discuss landing pad detection
Jetson & ZP was planning on having a closed loop control system, Ardupilot is now the flight controller we plan on flying, we just lost the controls part of the controls system by dropping ZP, the only thing left autonomy can do is perception which can be done on the ground station using the incoming video feed from the pilot camera
Landing pad detection model still needs to be trained and code to run inference needs to be written. It is unlikely this will be ready
It may be worth saving the risk of crashing with the Jetson especially since a lot of this is untested
The system will have a lot of inaccuracies and is unlikely to be running at comp.
We will need to write new drivers as well to make this happen from a autonomy/cv perspective
Instead of taking time now to salvage autonomy points we keep autonomy on the current ZP architecture on the understanding it won’t fly at this comp 23, but next comp 24 we can make it happen.
Autonomy IMACs integration with mission planner will not be pursued for the above reasons
This leaves only other stuff CV is doing to be QR code scanning, path optimization, & other stuff which will be discussed in IMACs sync