I have read several posts on DIY forums saying that they are trying to create a tilt-wing vehicle that is a VTOL aircraft. I myself am trying to create a quad-copter with a pusher prop to enable forward flight. However, APM doesn’t support VTOL as of yet. I am trying to find out if it would be possible to merge the two firmware so that I could have the Copter controlling the four hover motors and the Plane controlling the one pusher prop and the servos for the control surfaces. Thanks in advance.
Not yet, and not on the APM. It’s simply out of space. I’ve heard rumors of this down the road for the pixhawk but nothing confirmed yet, only teased.
That’s not to say that you couldn’t rip through the code yourself and pick out the pertinent parts to shove in to one glorious and not-very-equipped autopilot to do it yourself, but, it isn’t in the roadmap for APM.
Personally I think it would be fun too, but I’d rather get other features bedded in like spline-nav before going down the path of a “merged” platform.
I am currently working on mashing the bits of code I need to get the APM 2.5 to do this. essentially, flipping the AUX channel would change the platform from plane to quad and vice versa. I know this has been done before on the Multiwii platform but it doesn’t have features like GPS and altitude hold that I would like. a good preview of what this could look like is called a quad tilt rotor – there are a couple of good videos on youtube of some builds that are able to do the transition in flight.
Guys -
I’m wanting to do this (basically a VTOL flying wing) as well. I would really like to use the APM software elements for this, as there is great mission planning and all the other features.
I’m hoping the Pixhawk has the processing power to do this, as it’s pretty apparent that trying to do this with the APM hardware won’t be easy if even possible. So any thoughts here? Do we expect that the Pixhawk should be able to do this?
My only other real option here is to use the Lisa/M autopilot off the Quadshot - Still open source, has some good support, maybe not as feature rich for mission planning, etc, but will do VTOL “out of the box” as it were…
Thanks guys -
Bruce Markle
RoboTek Engineering