This may be a very important insight and one that I was hoping to get on the forum. My intention was to deploy the parafoil into a default glide configuration and then initialize the autopilot. I am trimming the parafoil for the descent rate and only wanted the autopilot to control heading. I figured this would make it much easier to get through all the high impact and high G portions of the flight into the controlled phase. Of course, the GPS lock needs to remain working throughout the flight as the reference for autonomous flight back to the recovery point.
Do you think the ardupilot system would allow such a deployment?
I’m glad to see someone else working on this also!