2024-08-30 Houston Atrium Cleanup

Introduction

Debrief

Media

  • Videos and Photos: 2024-08-30 Houston Field & E7

  • Pixhawk Ardupilot Logs

  • Some smaller media and conversations were posted in discord thread here.

  • We took some more photos of our outdoor test on the nice camera which we didn’t upload yet. All indoor media was captured on cell phones.

Flights

  • Tuning Outdoor Flight

    • takeoff flight test with flying in stabilize, loiter mode

    • Proceed optical flow sensor calibration

    • Proceed quick tune, and succeed quickly

    • Did autotune, each axis at a time. Each axis cost us one battery

      • Autotune aggressiveness is set to 0.1 (strong)

      • The batteries we have right now are pretty old, new ones are coming in

    • Tried flying in FlowHold flight mode without GPS

  • Indoor Flight 1

    • notch filer set to in-flight FFT

    • all indoor flight test is done in flowHold

  • Indoor Flight 2

    • notch filer set to in-flight FFT

  • Indoor Flight 3

    • notch filter set to static

  • Indoor Flight 4

    • notch filter set to throttle

Wins

  • Started up top and was able to make some tangible progress at cleaning.

  • Got more pilot practice.

  • Did not crash.

Issues

Oscillation Issue

  • Drone oscillation was visually worse than the previous indoor test

    • See media videos as evidence

  • Possible Causes

    • Autotune aggressiveness being set too high resulted in a poor tune. We really just want a very stable tune (lots of phase margin in all axes) so low aggressiveness may be best.

IMU Drift

  • Same issue as last time

  • See videos to show how offset it was when pilot landed or let go of the sticks

  • Unsure if this is solvable without scanning Lidar

  • Flowhold flight mode seemingly did not help

  • Pilot experience is helping a bunch here

Cornered & Large Paper Airplanes

  • We were not able to blow the larger airplanes

  • Videos show this but airplanes trapped in the corners were tough to get

  • A piece of debris has a heavy weight with a long streamer

    • there is a large concern of getting it in the propeller and we should continue to be careful

  • Possible solutions

    • Increase the weight of aircraft

      • increases the downforce the drone produces

      • would require retuning (though we probably need to do this anyways)

    • there are many other more complicated ideas floating around