Tuning and understanding loiter performance

ArduCopter
1

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the support and help I have found these forms very useful. I work at Manchester University on a research project looking at automatic pipe landing. I have a Vicon system setup as GPS to give motion capture data to my drone.
This is the first drone I built and I have been tuning the filters and controller. Currently, I have an ESC telemetry filter as notch 1 and FFT as notch 2.
I have also tried to tune the altitude hold P and acceleration P and I controllers.
Could someone advise me on the next steps to improve my drone’s performance?
My thoughts

  1. Remove the FFT filter as it seems unnecessary from the boad plots. Reduce delay.
  2. Tune the rate of roll and pitch to improve the step response.

Here is a log file from a manual landing on a pipe. landing1.bin - Google Drive
I have not used auto-tune so far since I have a small space to fly and am worried about crashing the drone. If this is the best approach can give it a try.

Thanks for the help
Warm Regards
Abdul

2

Have you been tuning it with this ? You should.

3

I have not. Will test this next time I am flying. Is there any particular section you recommend starting from or just start from scratch?

4

Start from Scratch. Without vicon, with a small GPS. Once it is all done, dump the gps receiver and add the vicon.