Q_AUTOTUNE - TriCopter Tilt Rotor Results

ArduPlane VTOL Plane
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Hi Everyone!

Just wanted to share with you our results from a few flights using Q_AUTOTUNE to try and improve on the VTOL performance of a tri-copter Tilt-Rotor (vectored yaw) platform. Tuning of each axis took in the range of 6 to 9 minutes (one battery pack per session). One thing we learnt very quickly (and unfortunately) is that some ESCs have a thermal-shutoff which resulted in a crash yesterday. Repairs were made and today we gave the platform ample time to cool off between flights.

Here are log files and videos of the Roll Tuning which was the only axis to successfully complete in one attempt:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ucuz75uH9rUS2t1DRGB8IxII0ML6Cg8G?usp=sharing

Here are the log files and videos of the Pitch Tuning which took 3 attempts to complete:

1st Attempt:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YVny_MephJ2xjtiy-V_mzMqrFJeH5Xqz?usp=sharing

2nd Attempt:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-MOs4rP5Mg4lNb9rkXcpTsEaBGmzepMD?usp=sharing

3rd Success:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LjdtpmAuT1SksM0EEzokhNhPmwQaeGIU?usp=sharing

Here are the log files and videos of the Yaw Tuning which took 2 attempts to complete thanks to not having level calibrated correctly:

1st Attempt:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14fIppVqtIVNKGr0btYcgdCFoWRRqspD9?usp=sharing

2nd Success:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bf1lBRO4eou8VsouKaN7Vy9KZDAJKfw1?usp=sharing

AUTOTUNED PIDS SHORT TEST FLIGHT:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1N1SNJMNFUMesEc_i97hBu3dXWFQZGFOV?usp=sharing

Could someone give me some tips on improving the yaw on this platform? Unfortunately I do not think that the YAW Q_Autotune did the best job in getting the wag out of it as you can see in the log files from the “AUTOTUNED PIDS SHORT TEST FLIGHT” logs above. Any other tips/suggestions on the tuning from here would also be greatly appreciated.

All in all, very impressed at how this Q_AUTOTUNE worked! Great job to all the devs and beta testers out there! Hope this effort of ours is useful!

Cheers!

@iampete, @Leonardthall, @tridge, @Naterater

2 Likes
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Thank you for this will look at logs tonight

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Thanks Marty. Please let me know if you have any suggestions to improve the PIDs, especially yaw.

1 Like
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yaw is never going to be that hot on a quad plane, you could, if possible, increase the range of the yaw available via tilts with Q_TILT_YAW_ANGLE. Make sure you don’t hit the wing with the props tho.

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Hey @iampete, Agreed that yaw is always going to be a challenge on a quadplane but I think that the autotune didn’t do a very good job if you look at the logs and parameters from after the autotune. The PIDs I had on it manually before seemed to perform better in maintaining yaw. I think Autotune even dropped D to 0. I have Q_TILT_YAW_ANGLE already set to the max for this setup. Would be interesting to hear why the Autotune didn’t get it better than it did. Perhaps another round is in order?

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yeah you can always try again, Autotune is quite conservative, you can try upping the aggressiveness.

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Hey there @ovolkmann, how did you fix the level calibration? I am getting a similar issue when trying to autotune a tilt rotor of my own. Any help or insight would be great, thanks!