Right, so I made the below vehicle and I want to use Ardupilot to control it, and I don’t really know where to start (Or I continue I guess)
(Ignore the nightmare wiring for now, will sort out in time)
The thing consists of two EDFs+thrust tubes to be bolted together in parallel, each with a thrust-vector rear nozzle and each with a pair of smaller EDFs pointing downwards at the front underneath the main EDF.
I hope for this to at least be able to fly about 10cm off the ground in a flat area. My theory for how this mess will work is:
• No lift from any wings
• Front mini EDFs provide front lift
• Thrust vectoring at the rear provides rear lift (and leftover thrust for forward thrust)
• Every effort made to keep pitch to 0
• I’ll get to turning at a far, far later on point, but will be using thrust differential combined and/or some element of roll+pitch to turn.
So far I’ve been playing around a bit with ardupilot and using it to control EDFs and servos and have put together a lua script with PID controllers for pitch, roll and height based on RC input. None of the PIDs are FF, just normal PID controllers implemented in lua
I haven’t been able to test it due to issues I’ve had with Mission Planner’s REPL feature and honestly I haven’t had the time with work etc.
I guess my main question is, am I on the right track for a piece of software to control this vehicle as described? I have written out said .lua script just to get my ideas all in the one place and sanity check myself that I’m thinking the right way.
I’d love to be able to use Ardupilot for all the other nifty features it has in time (route planning, DAQ, sensor libraries, etc.) plus it just seems like a good platform to work on. I have a pixhawk 6c I’ve been using so far.
So long story short, am I on the right path? Anyone have any insights? Should I take a different approach before using ardupilot, or maybe even leap into making a .cpp script to control this? Any advice welcome!