Bad day 4 U

Well, tried to photograph love making with Russian Heroine from VicaCopter on autopilot. Had a tail rotor failure straight away. 1 tail boom destroyed. Next, began the rework to power the camera off the Castle BEC. Accidentally plugged the camera shutter into +14V. Fried the Gumstix & the PIC.

The good news is we'll upgrade to a 600Mhz computer & have a more generic neural network for navigation.

Now the last notes on turning.

Well, the way turning works is U have a copter equilibrium tilt which produces 0 acceleration in an environment of no wind. That one is hard coded & relative to the IMU. U have a world equilibrium tilt which produces 0 acceleration in the current wind & it's relative to the world. That one is constantly updated by converting copter equilibrium to world frame & subtracting it from the current velocity feedback tilt in world frame.

The world equilibrium is translated to copter frame & added to the copter equilibrium to get the target for attitude hold. This way the force we exert against the wind always stays relative to the wind as the heading changes.

The problem is wind hitting the tail rotor & fuselage from different angles changes the world equilibrium. The hard coded copter equilibrium changes based on payload. It really is a kludge we avoided for a long time.

Interpolated Timelapse montage (4 min 55 sec)

A compilation of our still photo movies during hovering. This uses interpolated motion & it really is the pinnacle of stabilization.