When operating fully autonomously (i.e., without manual control or a guaranteed link to the ground station), tuning a vehicle can be difficult since the current autotune process requires either RC input or a GCS command. For these scenarios, it it useful to be able to start autotune inside a mission.
In review it was requested to have a different name for
manual_control_setpoint.z because of the adjusted range.
I started to investigate what naming is most intuitive and found
that most people recognize the stick axes as roll, pitch, yaw, throttle.
It comes at no surprise because other autopilots
and APIs seem to share this convention.
While changing the code I realized that even within the code base
the axes are usually assigned to a variable with that name or
have comments next to the assignment clarifying the axes
using these names.
The current practice of adding topics to the default set isn't scalable,
as it affects all setups.
By making sure topics are advertised on init, logger can just discard
topics that don't exist. This does not work for all topics, so topics are
specifically marked as optional. It can be extended to more topics later
on though.
This reduces the list of topics by ~35 on a pixracer configured as quad,
and reduces RAM usage by ~1KB.
mahima-yoga