xbow unav and dspic

[kenobe]

:D Hi
I have read articles of using stargate together with the xbow's unav to control a UAV.
I am trying to use the dspic30f in conjunction with the xbow to control a UAV ( heli) , is there a chance of success?

[clolson]

I don't know anything about the dspic30f, but if it has a fairly standard posix development environment and a reasonable C compiler (like gcc for instance) then it shouldn't be too hard to port over the Xbow open-source avionics code to your platform. Off the top of my head, the biggest thing I'd worry about is if you can read and write serial ports and if you have the pthread library available on your platform.

Oh, and I should point out that their code makes pretty frequent use of 64bit variables (doubles). That might be something else to worry about.

[Unterhausen]

The only person I have seen claiming success with the unav on heli's also re-wrote the unav code to close the loop on the unav's AVR. Seems like you are going to have to do a substantial re-write of the Stargate code as well. There are ways to do a Kalman Filter on limited precision hardware. In particular, square root filters probably are required. I'm sure there are similar techniques for the more modern Bayesian filter algorithms.

[kenobe]

Hi
The thing that I worry is the kalman filter. I am using a 120Mhz clock for the dspic30f. is it fast enough?
Implementing kalman filter is a problem, I need a shorter code for that. Is there one?