Turbine plane navigation tuning and throttle control

Hello,

I am trying to tune an SAB lizard turbine plane (10kg plane with 120N thrust) for auto runway landing. I also wish to do VTOL tailsitter hovering later on.

After doing autotune for roll and pitch, I tried an auto mission with circuit waypoints. The plane overshoots the waypoints and overspeeds through the turns. Here is the log.

After looking at the arduplane tuning recommendations, I plan to make the following changes

WP_RADIUS 40 → 100 (to start turning earlier)

THR_MAX 100 → 80 (to prevent excess speed. however, I need 90+% throttle for tailsitter Qhover, so I might need to raise it again if I do Qhover)

TECS_TIME_CONST 5 → 6 (for slow turbine engine response time)

TECS_THR_DAMP 0.5 → 0.6 (for slow turbine engine response time)

TECS_RLL2THR 10 ->7 (reduce excess speed gain on turns)

Would appreciate any recommendations for tuning. Thank you

You should adjust scaling airspeed and retune as it is way off. (IIRC if you set it to 30m/s you will need to decrease rate PID values by 4 as control deflections are scaled by 1/V^2)

You should fix TECS tuning instead of limiting throttle.

Tuning looks like it could be made a bit more aggressive, especially in pitch as you are using very little of control surface range. (May be accomplished by tuning with correct tuning airspeed).

There is something wrong with your airspeed data and TECS is falling back to throttle based control. 13m/s airspeed at rest is pretty bad.

I am afraid tuning hover with that will be quite hard as you have little thrust margin and slowly responding. You will also need some sort of thrust vectoring and yaw control.

Hi Lee,

A few things to change:

  • use ONESHOT_MASK to setup all the fast control surfaces as oneshot. That will gain you a bit of phase margin in the control loops
  • I suspect you will do better with roll and pitch PIDs dominated by P and D instead of FF. The autotune process produces a FF dominated tune

The main thing I’d recommend though is to find the closest aircraft to yours in the RealFlight user uploads and then get RealFlight working with your plane so you can do testing in a simulator. If you pay careful attention to the throws, weight distribution, thrust etc in the simulator you should be able to do a fair few tuning experiments there. You won’t get things exactly right, but I suspect it will help.

Cheers, Tridge

Thanks for all the suggestions. Will look into them

This sure sounds like an interesting project.

Can a turbine engine respond fast enough to hover? (I see @LupusTheCanine has a similar concern.)

It would be really fun to see a video of your progress.

Good luck.