Development of firmware for Fixed Wing VTOL.

[Kshitij Goel]

Hi everyone,

I am working on a control system development project for a Fixed Wing VTOL Aircraft. I am new to APM Firmware development. I am up to contributing to this wonderful Open-source project, which is a treat for enthusiasts like us.

Kindly, guide me how to go with it. If you want to see the rough isometric view of the aircraft I can post it here on request.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance! 

Regards

Kshitij Goel

Junior year Student

Aerospace Engineering

[Craig Elder]

Welcome to ArduPilot.

I suggest you get involved with Team Tiltrotor https://github.com/Tiltrotor.  They are leading the effort to create a VTOL system using Ardupilot.

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[Team Tiltrotor]

Hi Kshitij, Our work originally started using the APM 2.5 hardware, and our own prototype tiltrotor design. We did a general documentation of this project and posted on DIY Drones here. The majority work that went into this code revolved around the aeromechanics of a changing the thrust vector and maintaining attitude control at all possible thrust vectors without having 2 discrete modes (airplane and copter). After this project reached an endpoint we changed airframes to the FireFLY6 tiltrotor to focus on the autonomous portion of the code. We moved our code to a newer version of Copter (3.2.1) to obtain the benefits of the Pixhawk flight controller. This was 6 month effort for us (we are not software programmers by trade). There were many other major changes due to the change in configuration from a fixed pitched bi rotor tiltrotor to a Y6 - Flying wing.  A lot of those changes can be found in this branch . For your airframe you will only have to focus on the motors files and select the appropriate PID's for thrust (motors) and aerodynamic surfaces.

Your design should be much easier to implement than a variable thrust vector tiltrotor. Unfortunately all of our work is very "tiltrotor" airframe specific, and I can see that it is very difficult to simply "add another frame" the way we have structured our code. The other problem with using our code at the moment is that we are on a very legacy version of the code (Copter:3.2.1) that has not received some major upgrades in (Copter:3.3). And currently there are some big changes in the AP_Motors library that we are behind on.

Currently the PX4 VTOL team supports airframes exactly like yours. Since you'll be using your own hardware this may be easier and you'll have support from people flying your exact frame.

I am sorry we can't be more help. We dedicate so much of our free time to testing our own tiltrotor code, that our github, documentation, and rebases with master had to fall off the priority list.

Let me know if we can help with specifics. Sounds like Andrew Tridgell may be considering integrating this exact airframe soon. That will be very helpful for all of us working individual VTOL projects.

Thanks

Trevor

On Sat, Sep 5, 2015 at 11:00 AM, Kshitij Goel <kshitijgo...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Team Tiltrotor,

I want to write controller for a vehicle (hardware being developed, will be ready by December 2015) which looks like the somewhat like the picture attached with this post. I read your code on github, but I think I would need a bit of help with documentation. If there is any open-source documentation can you please share it on the repository? That would be of great help. I want to contribute the code that I develop using your repository again to ardupilot. 

Awaiting your response

Regards

Kshitij Goel

Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

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-Team Tiltrotor