I’m working on an odd project trying to jerry-rig Ardupilot to fly a powered paraglider.
Since the paraglider essentially only has yaw, throttle, and “flaps” (pulling on the brake lines changes the sail shape to speed up by reaching optimal glide or slowing down by making more lift and drag like a flap).
To do this, I want to bind the pitch to the throttle since the paraglider has no direct pitch controls. Increasing thrust, and therefore lift from the airspeed gain, is the only control that allows you to increase altitude. I also want to bind the throttle to “flaps” since this is essentially the speed control. Of course, there will be issues with this that will need to be worked out with testing, but as an initial platform, I just need to figure out how to change the bindings in mission planner first. Is there a guide to modifying control bindings in the documentation somewhere? I’m having difficulty finding one.
Do you want this to be autonomous? You could def get it flying in manual with some transmitter mixes. It would be an unusual application for a flight controller and you would be doing the takeoff manually anyway
I have it mixed for manual flight currently as you described, but this is for a project working on mid-air deployment with the goal of getting it to fly back to the landing site for the pilot to then land manually. We’re explore how effectively we can modify Ardupilot’s firmware to do basic cruise and gliding, but there’s little to go on in terms of past paraglider automation.
TECS already jointly controls speed and altitude so it should be possible to define a mixer to control altitude. That with RUDDER_ONLY if differential control primarily cause yaw should let you make a controllable.
Worst case you will need to write a custom mixer for it. There is lua mixer you could take a look at.
Hi @Maximus , do you managed to fly the paraglider in AUTO mode or some other autonomous mode? Do you wrote your own LUA-mixer or what did you do? Could you provide an explanation how do you managed to get it to work or send the parameters?
Stabilize worked for me with yaw stabilization but I didn’t managed mapping altitude control to throttle and making turns to yaw axis. The Ardupilot makes the turns by default with pitch and aileron and not with yaw.
Unfortunately, this project was scrapped almost a year ago and I don’t have access to the config of the prototype anymore. We did get stabilization and the circle feature to work eventually but autonomous climbing wasn’t achieved. I believe we did control mixing and eventually had the roll inputs bound to yaw (hence allowing the autopilot to crudely circle with enough tinkering), but I’m not positive.
Ok, thank you for your quick response.
I need to continue playing with the PID’s to output the control from the autopilot to the yaw. I don’t want stabilization in roll because the paraglider does stabilize itself so I don’t want to let the Pixhawk do this but I do want the control of the autopilot.
If anybody has some tips to me how to achieve this or did something similar in the past I would appreciate your help.