how to use thermal soaring feature on mission planner

Hi Guys,

I’m working on a project in the university to enhance the flight duration of UAV using different kind of techniques. one of the methods that we are planning to use is thermal soaring. I’m using mission planner as ground station and i found that the ArduSoar’s team developed this amazing autonomous soaring functionality feature. I was trying to use this feature on my project but i have encountered several difficulties. I’ve read the instructions on the ardupilot website and the paper that they published about how to set up the soaring feature but it was not clear for me.
I found the soaring features on the Full parameters list in mission planner and my question now is how to activate this feature? how to activate any feature from the Full parameters list in general? what are the requirements to set up and utilize the thermal soaring? Do i need programming background to use this feature ? i would be very grateful if someone can help and explain to me in details the requirements and the steps to enable the soaring feature.

Awad

Have you read what is in the wiki?

https://ardupilot.org/plane/docs/soaring.html

Yeah i did but it did not work for me. i want to understand how this feature works or how to use any of the commands in the full parameter list. for example i set up the soaring parameters like SOAR_ALT_CUTOFF, SOAR_ALT_MAX, etc… and then i clicked on write parameter to save them. and then i did set up a mission. now how i can know if the soaring is working? is the soaring is a flight mode or it will show up in the flight plan commands list ? honestly i need to understand first the commands in the full parameter list first ? what happens when for e.g i enable a command in the full parameter list ? is it going to show up somewhere? is it also possible test the soaring feature in the simulation ?

Did you watch that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwAX3cPvMqw&list=LL34G_kkrXieR8W2XQglAcSw&index=37&t=0s

i have also watched the video but it did not help answering my question.

The soaring in ardupilot is like soaring in paragliding or sailplanes. You are flying in auto or cruise mode and when thermal is found it will switch to loiter mode.
Loiting inside of thermal means climbing.
It is configured by three altitude parameters - when start thermalling or exit of thermals.
Also TECS required for efficient circling.

so i need is to set up the soaring parameters in the Full parameter list, save them and then set up a flight plan with considering that the altitude in the all way points should be above the SOAR_ALT_CUTOFF value that i already set up. the next step is to set up my plane in the Auto mode(in Flight Data) and the soaring should work automatically after that ?
is it possible to check if it’s working in the simulation ? or the only possibility is to do a flying test ?

I’m not sure if simulator supports thermals.
If not, the only one way is setup telemetry and take a look onto trajectory in real flight. It should looks like a real soaring of handglider, paraglider or sailplane.
It you’re able to see shifted circles on flight trajectory it works
Be ready to switch into manual or rth mode if something goes wrong.

But thermalling is not a way when you should fly mission from point A then to point B and so on. It’s like a free flight depends on wind and clouds

Thanks a lot guys. This was very helpful.

There’s a specific sim for soaring: https://ardupilot.org/dev/docs/soaring-sitl-with-silentwings.html