Planning

Scope

• Pegasus 2

  • Competition Task 2 Testing

    • Manual piloting, no autonomy

    • Test both solutions, both should be hot swapable and swapping between them validated in the bay in advance

• Houston

  • Competition Task 1 - full system test (with pilot flying)

  • Tracking Antenna - Pushed to TBD, still issues with sending data.

    • Will test Pitch and Yaw

Flight Cards

Flight Card 1

Flight Card 2 not ready - pushed to future flight test

Flight Card 3

Timeline

• 8:45 start charging 6S batts

• 9:30 All Attendees present in WARG Bay

• 9:45 briefing

• 10:20 leave the bay for the test

• 1

• @Georgia Vachon Westerlund has records of timeline, will add when I get the photos off d800

Attendees

• @Jerry Tian

• @Georgia Vachon Westerlund

• @Nathan Green

• @Daniel Puratich

• @Anthony Luo | Media | needs transport

• @Ryan Scomazzon (Car if needed, wasn’t needed)

• @Balaji Leninrajan Autonomy

• @Tochi Okoro Autonomy

• @Evan Janakievski

• @Alison Thompson (car)

• @Ben Lovegrove

• @Andy Meng (car)

• @Camilo Artigas Alos

• @Smile Khatri

• @Megan Spee

Key People Not Attending

If you’re directly involved in this stuff and cannot make this test please note it here. All onsite FTCs and subteam leads should fill this out please.

• @Maxwell Lou

• @Sam Zhang

• @Omer Sajid

Debrief

Timeline

• Departed Bay: 10:15am

• Arrived: 10:40am

• Debrief Begins: 1:45pm

Pegasus 2 Barrel Landing Attempt

• good

  • called off when @Nathan Green didn’t think it would work

  • default tune was better than auto tune

• bad

  • concerns about it clipping (contacting the drum and catching on the edge… or just hitting the edge a lot)

    • actual drum will have a lip similar to ours

  • task is significantly harder than anticipated

  • taking off from the drum results in a clipped edge

    • even if we make the drone smoother maybe not worth it

  • had to disable compass because the drum is metal

    • disabled Rm-3100 (external mounted to frame, not on poles)

  • drone drifts a lot from positionwe

    • check if this is due to tune or because of wind

  • Op flow was in the wrong orientation on monster mount → rotated properly and used tacky tape to reattach it

    •  

• thoughts

  • landing drone in barrel is hard

    • it could be hella windy at comp

    • using acro, better tunes, there are ways to make stuff better

mounting the lidar and the op flow close together would be better – they are ‘tied together very closely’ in software (ardu).

for a dangling redesign, where pumps are below, it would only generate tension on the drone’s cable/line. so long as the pump is submerged and heavier than water with enough slack, the drone can loiter in wind gusts and have enough variable distance.

peggy 1 autotune? → went very well because we knew what params and behaviours peggy 1 needed. This peggy 2 tune is worse because we haven’t spent the time tuning. However the two frames are kiiiinda similar so might be able to use tune 1 on peggy 2. would be better to retune well obviously.

Speculation time

1-2 meters is within ground effect range.

occurred today with dropping the pump on a rope to the drum. loiter while the stick commanded down, built up a bunch of error and dropped suddenly. could have also been one of the lidars fucking up a bit.

Lidar stops being used over water (testing filling the tank) - stops over the water. reports a lot of distance. Likely switches to barometer. which is a bit more inaccurate. probably freaks out due to the change in height measured.

try turning off sensors and incrementally turn them on to check which ones are getting funny. figure out what causes the problems and what sensors improve what behaviours.

• next steps

  • tune (water and no water) - autotune only tunes attitude

    • tune without water and run the drone with water to see what happens/how this affects things.

  • do an aggressive tune for position and default/regular tune for attitude

  • mech to fix op flow mount (monster mount)

    • monster mount on different arm than peggy 1?

      • offset is different from Peggy 2, correct the offset in Ardupilot

    • maybe mont the lidar on the monster mount as well?

    • could also attach the old op flow mount to another arm

  • can try props that don’t fold (will need to buy them)

    • this can be characterized by trying a polymer 22” propeller to compare the folding ones. compare the curves over a throttle up period see if they look diff over time.

    • use thrust testing rig? (never been used before)

  • Fly Houston to characterize the tune. run this next term: get people used to checking the logs, being able to diagnose, and tune well. this can be done on Houston for practice and then ideally this skillset is applied to peggy.

Pegasus 2 Water Dispensing Attempt

• good

  • the camera worked to see the water stream and the bucket

    • didn’t help to be honest

  • home depot buckets

    • shoulda brought hammer but yea it’s fine

  • RC link and video seems fine on average

• bad

  • leaks a lot gg

    • known issue with seal, fixable

  • the inlet was siphoning initially - the tube does stick into the tank by ~ 1cm

  • the angle of the tube can shift as of right now. not controlled by anything but like, random zip tied and duct tape. maybe make a mount.

  • RC failsafe’d for a second when the drone landed - as soon as the drone disarmed it said “RC failsafe cleared” - might be an ardu glitch

• thoughts

  • tuning is the biggest thing for pegasus 2.

    • ideally the drone is tuned well enough that it can on god actually stay within 10 cm on each side. right now, it tweaks out really hard when it hits the bucket.

  • dangling thing should have a breakpoint….

    • if fishing line is connected, make sure that if it gets caught, it can break off- like the joints or the maybe fasteners that attach it are weak enough

    • the press fit tube fittings MIGHT be enough to be a target break point. however at an angle, they will not rip out easily.

  • “Drone doesn’t stay in the same spot when you let go of the controls”

    • opflow on white snow terrible. maybe generate some texture

    • would also have this issue on dirt or concrete or grass in alberta

    • “just be aware of this”

Houston Cluster Estimation Attempt

• summary

  • rtl failsafe triggers at 10.5V for both attempts

  • log files were made for both, so there are images, but no detections were done

• good

  • new motors are good (they stopped making bad/strange sounds) “no cooked”

• bad

  • daniel discharging battery for analog video system on pegasus

  • autonomy script doesnt auto-start as it should

    • should be tested in the bay in the future

  • only charged 2 batts for Houston, did not establish in FT document how many batteries we needed for each flight test.

• thoughts

  • how much current consumption does the new motors consume? Is it more or less than other motors?

    • about the same

  • Pre-heating batteries?

    • we have heating blanket with an XT60

    • could do in-flight heating

  • can we set the rtl voltage to be lower when we’re flying in the cold because the batteries will sag more when cold

    • could compare warm and cold batties

  • charging extra batteries to account for analog video system

    • we didnt plan how much we wanted to test so hard to predict how much we needed

  • forgot duct tape, hammer

    • have a procedure before leaving the bay and preparing for any flight test. list of items that should be in the flight test box etc. controllers charged. batteries allocated for each task.

    • used to have one but fell out of use. can go back and build off of that.

    • need to not forget stuff