2024-08-28 Houston Atrium Cleaning

Introduction

Summary

Aircraft Information

Known Rules & Regulations

Date

  • We want to do it before the start of F24.

  • We cannot do it on the weekend as plantops is not present.

  • Evenings are preferred as E7 will be mostly depopulated.

  • Date and time must be approved so this document will remain ambiguous

Members

Participating

  • @Daniel Puratich

  • @Hardy Yu

Confirmed Unavailable

Unavailable until the first day of F24 term.

  • @Smile Khatri

  • @Yuchen Lin

Further Information

  • See our internal conversation at this discord thread.

  • Further context can be found within the WARG Email.

Flight Test Plan

Timing

  • Late in the evening or early in the morning is preferred as E7 will be mostly depopulated.

  • Testing window should be ~ an hour in length.

    • Targeting 30 minutes of setup time and 30 minutes of flight time max.

Location

 

image-20240827-153527.png

Concerns

Safety Controls

Referring to https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/hsprograms/hazard/hierarchy_controls.html

  • People will be prevented from going close to the drone.

    • This flight plan involves perimeter control to ensure there are no members of the general public / university community in the flight area so nets and tethers will not be employed.

  • Pilots will maintain line of sight with the aircraft at all time.

Liability Controls

  • The 7th floor administration is assuming responsibility if the unlikely case of a propeller strike.

Debrief

image-20240829-021409.png
Houston Aircraft (just prior to flight test at 1.3 kg w/ battery)

Media

  • Hardy recorded on his phone.

  • There are some images we took on the ops camera. Won’t bother downloading just yet.

  • Daniel took some photos on his phone as well

    • mostly not during flight as was busy piloting

Timeline

  • started setting up around 8:50 and finished at around 10pm

  • First we went to the stairs between the second and third floor starting the first flight

    • We did not need to do accelerometer or megnetometer calibration in flight.

  • Althold flight mode first, noticed some altitude instability during flight

    • This was somewhat predicted due to barometer error and similar behavior was observed outside.

    • Notably the barometer is temperature sensitive.

  • Changed to Stabilize flight mode for the rest of the flights

    • eliminated the altitude instability and was controllable due to pilot practice with this more manual throttle mode.

  • Disabled compass 1 and enabled compass 2 for determining heading when using 2nd battery

    • The IMU error didn’t get mitigated at all, more compass error noticed after making this change

    • it turns out this magnetometer change doesn’t play an important role in this game

  • Noticed IMU drifts after a period of flight, have to land every 5 mins to reset it

    • Sometimes it would automatically reset, we have videos showing this

    • Sometimes a power cycle was required. This was very time consuming with only two people on the flight line.

  • Ended up consuming all three batteries

    • Each battery can last for estimably 15 mins of flight time

Wins

  • No crashes

    • Prop guards never contacted the wall

  • Cleared some debris

  • Yaw was very stable

  • Throttle was very stable in stabilize flight mode

Issues

IMU Issue

  • What was the issue:

    • The drone’s definition of level would drift over time.

  • Resulted in

    • Pilotting became more difficult over time as pilot would have to hold a constant stick input to maintain level flight

    • We landed on the ledges accidentally twice when the drone was harder to control .

    • Lots of time having to land on the ground over and over again so the drone could reset it’s definition of level flight

  • Possible Solutions (we can test these and may brainstorm more)

  • Why we didn’t catch this sooner

    • All our other tests were outside and away from large metal obstacles so this condition did not arise as severely as it did.

  • What caused it:

    • Flying near the metal walls seemed to cause the center drift to become much more severe.

    • Doing sharp stick inputs when in the middle of the event space did not cause any problems.

    • Flying near the concrete didn’t cause much problems either it seemed.

    • We have videos showing this, maybe review those and don’t trust us so much.

Debris Removal Issue

  • Resulted in:

    • The paper airplanes get stuck under the metal piece on the edge of the wall and it means even though we’re blowing them up a bit the nose tip remains still stuck in the crevice.

    • hard to clean the paper airplane on the corner/beside the wall

    • sometimes we blow the paper airplane to those spots as well

  • Possible Solutions (we can test these and may brainstorm more of course)

    • propeller direction config such that it sucks objects instead of blow them away?

    • A different approach.

  • Why we didn’t catch this sooner

    • This was our simplest possible approach and we weren’t too sure how it would go

      • that is why we have this test flight !!

  • What caused it:

    • the propellers blows the stuff outwards

    • It’s tough to get close to the wall to avoid blowing stuff closer to the wall

Next Steps

  • Look into issues.

  • Email Derek & Dennis to update them of our status.

  • Try again on Friday evening for another test flight.