2024-02-10 Pegasus + Houston Flight Test
- Megan Spee
- Anthony Luo
- Jerry Tian
Sections for requesting team to fill out:
Admin preparation
Test Cards / Test Plan
Mandatory Attendees
Sections for flight test coordinator to fill out:
Flightline team
Location
Status
Drone
Sections for flightline team to fill out:
EFS to fill out flight test cards
Admin Preparation
Your status should read āsubmittedā when you submit the FTR to our Flight Test Coordinator.
Once the coordinator approves, and a date/location/drone has been assigned, the status will change to āwaiting for sub team reviewā. Once all sub-teams have reviewed and signed off, the status will change to āapprovedā
Requested By | @Megan Spee |
|---|---|
Sub-Team Review (To be checked once reviewed by sub-team representative) | Mechanical Electrical EFS Autonomy Operations |
Date of Request | 2024-01-30 |
Goal Summary |
|
Status? | Waiting for Sub-Team Review |
Desired Airframe | Houston / Pegasus |
Location + Time | WrestRC |
Testplan - to be filled out by requesting team
Create ONE table per test-item. Eg: āLanding pad images over asphaltā, ālanding pad images over grassā, ālanding pad images over grass, highā should all be unique tables.
Use each expand to capture one series of tests, eg āLanding pad detectionā or āAuto-tuningā.
Necessary Preparation
Explain what capacity you need, what needs to be mounted, etc.
Mechanical
Electrical
Embedded Flight Software
Autonomy
Attendees
This is a section for all attendees from your subteam which will be present for this flight test. (because they are testing their products, or otherwise)
Name | Phone # (opt) | Sub-team | Driving | Role | Ā |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
@Megan Spee | Ā | Director | toyota prius | Ā | Ā |
@Anthony Luo | Ā | Director | 5-pass sedan (smol) | Ā | Ā |
@Maxwell Lou ? | Ā | Mech | Caravan | Ā | Ā |
@Jerry Tian | 6472074122 | electrical | Ā | checking harness & debug Gemini if needed | Ā |
@Yuchen Lin | Ā | EFS | Ā | flight test coord | Ā |
@Ayoung Eun | Ā | EFS | Ā | Ā | Ā |
@Andy Meng | Ā | Ā | Ā | Ā | Ā |
@Ayush Ganguly | Ā | EFS | Ā | Testing OSD and VTX | Ā |
This section and remaining to be filled out by FTC and Flightline Team
Flightline Team
Name | Phone # | Role | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|
Ā | Ā | Ā | Ā |
Ā | Ā | Ā | Ā |
Pre-Flight Preparation
Checklists
Incident Procedures
Weather
Light chance of rain, sunny, and above 0.
Potential chance of steady wind & gusts up to 30+km/h.
Flight Test Timeline
Date/Time | Action | Notes |
|---|---|---|
0700 | Start charging batteries 4x 6s 5000mah (pegasus) 3x 3s 4000mah (houston) | Ā |
0930 | Final flight inspections | Ā |
1000 | Briefing @ WARG Bay | Ā |
1015 | Begin loading vehicles | Ā |
1030 | Arrival at Flight Test Location | Ā |
Ā | Card 1-1 | Ā |
Ā | Card 1-2 | Ā |
Ā | Card 1-3 | Ā |
Ā | Card 1-4 | Ā |
Ā | Card 2-1 | Ā |
Ā | Card 3-1 | Ā |
Ā | Card 3-2 | Ā |
Ā | Packup | Ā |
Ā | Debrief | Ā |
0200 | We outta here bois | Ā |
11:40 | Flight test plan (Pegasus) Misson 2 - Arm & take off time | Ā |
11:43 | landing | Ā |
11:48 | Mission 3: arm and take off | Ā |
11:52 | disarm and land | Ā |
12:09 | Mission 4 (Test VTX and OSD): arm and take off | Ā |
12:11 | disarm and land | Ā |
12:19 | Houston flight test mission 1: arm and take off | Ā |
12:21 | disarm and land | Ā |
12:22 | Mission 2: Testing with box obstruction: arm and take off | Ā |
12:22 | disarm and land | Ā |
12:23 | Mission 3: arm and take off | Ā |
12:25 | crashed into obstacle and disarm | Ā |
12:28 | Mission 4 (increased distance) : arm and take off | Ā |
12:29 | disarm and land | Ā |
Ā | Ā | Ā |
Ā | Ā | Ā |
DEBRIEF
Ā
Ā
LTE issue from last weekend (noise??) fixed! - flying very fast did not cause dropout. LTE antenna on leg of peggy.
VTX and OSD function
Pink controller arm switch working
Flight line communication good
Tested gemini on houston (worked) (but no link stats)
Obstacle avoidance on houston worked but not great
once it clipped the bins
Forgetting parts at the bay: VTX antenna & connectors
ardupilot configs not set beforehand
for RFDs
for OSD
for removal of OFS on Pegasus
VTX harness was scuffed
used breadboard jumper wires and electrical tape: loose
Houston would tip and propstrike the ground on several landings
360 lidar was late to prepare, was being screwed on morning of test
Particular RPM causes drone to shake pretty hard, not very detrimental, it just has to be throttled past in order to avoid.
Possible chance of power line clipping - we were 50 meters up and nearly BVLOS, not sure if we were going to clip trees or power lines in the distance
LTE dropouts on pegasus again
suffers when 1.3 GHz video transmitter is on.
either separate the antennas, use different freq, or find another video solution.
mount on opposite sides of the drone? or try 5.8 GHz video
Houston difficult controls.
tipped, shook, ran into bins,
drifts in a large radius in loiter
had a medium hard landings a couple times
landing houston in wind was very hard: needed to angle very hard, risk of propstrike and tipping very high
hit angle limit on pegasus (30 deg) so never hit the top speeds
Did not mount VTX on drone for flight test
Tracking antenna did not work
Ā
Action items
Get the max weight of houston to mechanical for new landing gear design
more stable to avoid tipping
Update angle limit and re-run max speed
try landing on landing pads with current FPV setup: need mux harness and second camera harness prior
VTX range test
configure OSD better
change from icarus config
fix the āturning on and off in the airā problem
get link stats between gemini and the drone forwarded to logs somewhere
buying pre crimped wires to build a proper VTX harness
Weathervaning
figure out obstacle avoidance parameters/setup on houston
get new batteries
hit 70 amp current draw at one point
indicates battery health bad
document OA parameters and how it translates to behavior. @Anthony Luo to look at this
clean up harnessing on pegasus:
shorten all the cross wires
clean up all little wires too
Ā
Analysis
logs are uploaded, donāt need much analysis on them
Vibe
Pegasus generally shows good vibration means, near 10 in all axis. (where 10 is essentially perfect). Comparing against vanguard shows worse vibe performance in some instances, but not to a significant degree.
Houston showed incredibly bad vibration, likely due to chipped propellers.
Attitude Control
Wind was estimated to be around 20-40km/h, the highest winds weāve flown Pegasus in to-date. Attitude control performance on roll and pitch axis are excellent, even given the higher vibe.
Ā
Current Draw
During card 2 - 1, multiple missions were run. On average, when flying at full speed forward, we were limited by our MAX_LEAN_ANGLE of 30 degrees. At this angle, our average current draw is visually observed to be around 80Amps.
Efficiency
Snipping from sections where Pegasus was at maximum or near-maximum forward velocity, we are able to calculate efficiency in mah/km using the following formula:
BAT.Curr[A] * 1000. [mA/A] / GPS.Spd [m/s] * (3600[s/h] / 1000 [m/km] ) --> Eff[mAh/km]
Average efficiency at high-speed shows somewhere between 700-1000 mah/km
Assuming battery capacity of 2*6000 = 12000 mah, this means we expect to be able to run 12km at 15m/s = 55km/h, giving us ~ 4 laps in ~26minutes. This is perfect assuming we get a 30 minute flight windowā¦.