Attitude control for a VTOL in fixed wing mode. Guided

ArduPlane
1

Hi,

I need to operate in an area with by wildfires, this environment is affected by strong winds and upwards movement of air that destabilized my VTOL. I have an onboard computer on my VTOL and would like to implement a stabilizer for this environment, where i am using a thermal camera to effectively avoid the more dangerous zones, but i need fine control over the drone.

I would like to know if arducopter supports a attitude control method in guided mode? The available documentation feels quite confusing. Is it the same as in quadcopter? Can i use a velocity control in fixed wing mode?

The solution is intended for real-time wildfire mapping, i can map them quite well, but can’t operate safely in the environment. I have models to understand what is best attitude given the current aerodynamics, but not sure if i can use them with ardupilot.

2

Hello! It is possible to set attitude targets in Guided mode via MAVLink.

See here for an example from our autotest suite: ardupilot/Tools/autotest/arduplane.py at master · ArduPilot/ardupilot · GitHub.

Keep in mind that the communications bandwidth between the flight controller and the onboard computer might be a bottleneck for high-rate control.

If you require high-bandwidth control, perhaps you’d better look at the integration of Ardupilot with ROS that is under development.