Hi All,
I’m working on a vehicle platform that can drive and fly at the same time, which means i needa merge quad copter and the rover functions into a single config - what would be the best approach to configure the vehicle? Thanks for all the help in advance!
I did it a while ago by using two flightcontrollers.
Both FCs shared the GPS TX line and one FC had the RX line connected. I also used one telemetry radio and a cable to connect one UART on each FC to forward the telemetry.
Thanks for the reply! am afraid i don’t have the luxury to put in two flight controllers - the weight is getting excessively high because of the battery and powerplants used.
I see a lot of custom coding in your future then. A Matek H743-mini board is 7g…
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Yes Dave - loads of it. not to mention i’m using thrust vectoring on 4 EDFs to cancel the pitching moment when moving. Will need a lot of help from everyone here.
do you need it to automatically navigate as both a rover and a quadcopter? if you can manually drive it would simplify it a lot as you could just pass though the motors.
Yes i’m going to operate it manually for now at least, so as long as I can tune the vehicle as two vehicles in a frame that’s fine.
The whole plan is to have a stick fully control the rover and another controlling the thrust vectoring - so takeoff and landing will be automated (which AMP has the functions)
I’m really hoping that automation isn’t required… but I won’t be surprised if I’m demanded to make that happen
ok thats relatively simple you just set it up as a quadcopter then just map the driving motors to the RC input using RC passthrough on a spare channel, if you have a programmable radio it will make it much easier since you can program it to disable the driving motors when you lift the throttle.
is it tank steering or car steering?
syma used to do a flying car, I had one for the kids, the way it worked was when the quadcopter throttle was at zero the rc input controlled the driving motor and steering using pitch and yaw. but as soon as you lifted the throttle they turned off and it was just a regular quadcopter
Yeap it’s something down that line! Just that mine’s on a larger scale.
It’s going to be car steering (afterall the base chassis is a RC car) - am hoping the suspensions can take up all that weight i’m putting it on.
And yes, the radio is programmable, just that it’s a redundancy to let the flight controller deal with it first.
essentially what your doing is setting it up a quadcopter and a RC car, with the RC car controlled via 2 channels passed though from the quadcopter. The flight controller doesnt really need to know that its there.
If you were trying to get it to auto navigate as a quadcopter then navigate as a rover then that would have been far more difficult and would require software modifications or 2 controllers.
Got it - Appreciate the clarification! At least one less worry here.
That leaves to the bigger problem - having the thrust vectoring PID with reference on the quad copter PID.
Seems to me the most flexibility would be achieved with 2 FC’s and Standby. A couple of H7 mini’s isn’t going to cost much weight. Together much less than a Cube for example. Don’t really see the downside.
There isn’t actually, but the bigger concern I’d have is the lack of estate which impacts the EMI that I’d face - definitely on the table given a V2 happens!
Yeap that’s what I’m kinda looking at as of now - i reckon the code will be the same as typical tailsitters but with 4 of those EDFs i thought the copter basis would be better.