I am thinking about using ArduPilot to create an autonomous small airplane. However, when reading the documentation about the Guided Mode (I would be using an onboard camera together with a raspberry Pi communicating with the ArduPilot hardware) it seems that it only can handle waypoints? I.e different altitude,latitude and longitudes. I am interested in commanding accelerations to it instead. Have I understood the documentation correct when I am stating that this is not possible?
Do you really mean acceleration? That doesn’t seem to make much sense to me and an aircraft could only be controlled in this way with many restrictions, if at all. Perhaps it will be easier to understand if you describe why you want this ?
You can control a plane in cruise mode without having to determine waypoints yourself.
I am still not getting your point
I assume your PI is acting like the pilot by watching the camera. So like a real pilot under visual flight conditions. If the pilot wants to turn he moves the stick and controlls the turn rate by moving the stick more or less. The acceleration is function of the turn rate and the speed. So what is the difference in commanding the turn rate or the acceleration.
With the flight mode FBWA you are commanding moreless the turn rate with the stick input signals as I understood
Yes, the thought was to have my PI to act as a pilot. Well as you are saying the acceleration is a function of the stick position, thus in my mind it would be easier if the PI was commanding acceleration instead. Less work would have to be done to try to find the right stick command to achieve the desired acceleration. Perhaps I am in the wrong and just don’t understand the system
Hi! I am sorry if my question broke the Code of Conduct, that was not my desire. From my point of view I was only trying to understand how the guided mode of ArduPilot works. My understanding was that it only worked with waypoints and I was asking for confirmation of this. How did I breach the Code of Conduct?
For example, to follow a road. When the road is turning I would like the plane to turn with the same turn radius as the road, thus a simple design would be for the visual based guidance system to command a side-acceleration equal to the turn radius of the road divided by the squared plane speed (with some correction if the plane starts to diverge from the road).
Ok, got it. So at this example you need to know the exact ground speed (not airspeed) and the exact turn radius including possible changes of the radius if it is not always constant. But this sounds a little ideal. So as you said you need a feedback to check if your plane follows the ideal curve.
I think if you are doing it like a real pilot putting the stick in the direction of the curve and lower or rise it depending on the feedback is not much different only you don’t need exact groudspeed and curve radius.
Well sooner or later the plane will have to land… Will be hard to do that without ever accelerating downwards. Just used an easy number of 1 G as an illustrative exampel of what a command could be.
But still, my understanding after reading the documentation is that acceleration cannot be commanded to the ArduPilot. It has to be either waypoints in the Guided Mode or stick commands in the others.
