Running experiments on motors mid flight

ArduCopter Copter 4.5
1

I’m working on a research problem, and it involves a series of experiments on motors.

I’m trying to do these:

Kill one motor mid-flight
Set pwn outputs to motors mid flight
Kill all motors at the same time any point in flight

I tried lua scripting for these. It’s causing a lot of problems. Any suggestions on how to automate this/ do these kinds of experiments?

I’m using SITL+ Ardupilot, as well as Holybro X500+Ardupilot (Quadcopter, x frame)
RC is disabled. Controlling the drone only using a laptop, over telemetry.
Pixhawk 6C

2

There are FW inbuilt options to perform these kind of actions. But you do need to recompile and upload the FW to your FC.
Things like disable a GPS via a RC switch.

Kill all motors at the same time any point in flight ← this is a standard RCX_OPTION called “emergency stop”

PS: you should really get a RC, it will make your live a lot easier.

3

There are scripts for killing motors in flight in the scripting library. They can do 1 and 3 and modification to do 2 should be trivial.