This allows PWM and all other output methods to configure
stopped, idling and full thrust points and use them consistently.
The fact that a fixed wing motor can be stopped when zero thrust
is demanded is explicit and could in principle even be disabled.
The mechanism is the same as for a standard VTOL stopping the
multicopter motors in the fixed wing flight phase.
This allows to consistently define:
Motor stopped - disarmed PWM
Motor idling - minimum PWM
Motor at full thrust - maximum PWM
Any allocation can then distinctly decide if
a motor should be running or not depending
on the context and also explicitly command that.
Before this the ESC calibration aborts if battery detection doesn't work.
The problem is if the user still connects the battery as he gets instructed
and the calibration aborts then the ESCs are in calibration mode and
after abortion calibrate to the wrong value.
Also I realized there's no additional safety by aborting the calibration
if the battery cannot be detected during the timeout because a pixhawk
board without power module will report a battery status from the
ADC driverand in it that no battery is connected which is the best
it can do. In this situation the motors will still spin if the
ESCs are powered.
Some ESCs e.g. Gaui enter the menu relatively quickly if the
signal is high for too long. To solve that it's kept high shorter.
Also all tested ESCs detect the low signal within a shorter time
so no need to wait longer.
- Change timings for a more reliable calibration.
- Make sure there's an error message when battery measurement is not
available also when it gets disabled after system boot in the power
just above the calibration button.
- Safety check if measured electrical current goes up after issuing the
high calibration value for the case the user did not unplug power
and the detection either fails or is not enforced.
The entire logic did not work for the case when the throttle channel is
reversed because then QGC sets trim = max for that channel and
the result is only half the throttle range.
with the goal to make it more clear and the error only appear when
armed but every time the running task doesn't actually match
the mapping inside the start_flight_task() function.
to enable proper automatic output in gtest unit tests
that compare two `Matrix`, `Vector` or two `Dual` objects.
Credits to @jwidauer for showing me this trick.
- Switching to the first order filter that was previously
only in FlightTaskManualAltitude.
- Moving the scaling of full stick deflection to
radians per second into the class.
This is fully backwards compatible: If the throttle trim is set to
the minimum then it's the legacy calibration and gets
interpreted such that there is no trim and behavior remains as before.
If the trim is set to a different value than the minimum then it gets
used like with all other channels which was unsupported before.
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.
To be consistent with all other axes of stick input and avoid future
rescaling confusion.
Note: for the MAVLink message 69 MANUAL_CONTROL it's using the full range
according to the message specs now [-1000,1000].
once the rampup starts. The rampup requires a valid vertical velocity setpoint.
The corner case is:
- We are before takeoff and amending the setpoint to be 0,0,100 acceleration
in order to idle
- The rampup starts BUT the setpoint is not yet overwritten by the trajectory
setpoint topic
- The idle setpoint gets amended to not contain a feed-forward vertical
acceleration because the rampup is velocity based
- The result is a brief invalid 0,0,NAN acceleration setpoint
- That invalid setpoint gets overridden by a failsafe that holds zero velocity
- Zero velocity leads to applying ~hover thrust briefly
It's very important that the in descend detection is always
at a strictly higher velocity than the vertical movement check.
This combination is basically used to check for vertical downwards
velocity tracking. Desired descend, no movement -> ground
If in descend threshold is lower than vertical movement it is
by definition even with perfect tracking the case that with
any velocity between the two thresholds there is no movement
even though a descend is commanded.
See first fix of this problem #7831e39b38ba96
When hitting zero thrust by stick there is 0 torque authority
without airmode. So 0% minimum manual thrust should never be the default
without airmode.
Uses COM_SPOOLUP_TIME to slowly ramp the throttle and allow the
tailrotor to compensate in a coordinated way based on the yaw
compesation from throttle, see CA_HELI_YAW_TH_S.
This coordinated spoolup is necessary to avoid unsafe yaw twitches
because of the heli rotating until the correct compensation kicks in
through the feedback controller.
2fbb70d9ca made the lowest possible
throttle value commanded by stick in Stabilized mode before taking off 0.
The real world problem with this is that when takeoff is detected then
the entire throttle scaling range jumps from
[0, MPC_MANTHR_MIN]
to [MPC_MANTHR_MIN, MPC_MANTHR_MIN].
As a result whenever MPC_MANTHR_MIN is not zero there is a thrust jump
on every takeoff just at the moment takeoff is detected even when the
stick is moved continuously.
Because of this I suggest to revert to having a higher throttle value
from the beginning on because it's less complicated and there's
no obvious value in starting out with zero thrust if anyways not
possible to go back to zero for safety once takeoff is detected.
Matthias Grob