But fix the two crucial problems:
- When to begin the ramp?
There's a calculation now for the velocity ramp initial value
such that the resulting thrust is zero at the beginning.
- When to end the ramp?
The ramp is applied to the upwards velocity constraint and it
just ramps from the initial value to the velocity constraint
which is applied during flight. Slower/going down is always possible.
Without always updating the takeoff state it will not get skipped when
the takeoff happened manually and when you switch from manual to position
mode the drone goes to idle and falls.
There are two local_position_setpoint in the position controller.
One describing the setpoint the task gives to the position controller
and a second one with the output of the position controller. I corrected
the wrong one during takeoff because the new takeoff thrust ramp runs after
the controller and not before.
The velocity ramp had problems with:
- different vehicle tunings resulted in the start value of the resulting
thrust ramp staring either higher and lower than zero thrust.
lower -> delay of beginning
higher -> small jump at beginning
- when a task set position and velocity at the same time during takeoff
(which AutoSmoothVel does) it resulted in a velocity setpoint
jump at the end of the ramp because the additional velocity
setpoint correction from the position controller was not considered.
The thrust ramp should now be very deterministic:
- always start at zero
- always end at the curreant thrust setpoint output
of the complete position controller
The initial idea of the flight task architecture was that
a task can freely set it's setpoints and doesn't have to
worry about takeoff and landing. It would just takeoff
when it's landed and there's a setpoint to go up and
land when it puts a setpoint that pushes into the ground.
With the takeoff logic there are some significant interface
problems depending on the way a task is implemented:
From the setpoint is not high enough to trigger to
an unexpected takeoff because of some estimator
fluctuation affecting the setpoint. It's easiest to solve this
by allowing the task to determine when a takeoff is triggered.
If no condition is implemented by default a task is not
allowing a takeoff and cannot be used to get the vehicle
off the ground.
After boot the user is in manual mode and if he has an RC
but doesn't switch out the thrust gets set to the throttle stick
position. When he then starts a takeoff from tablet the thrust is still
high while arming and the land detector immediately sees a takeoff
skiping smooth takeoff from the position controller.
- start from a velocity setpoint pushing into the ground
to ramp from idle thrust up.
- start with a bit higher velocity setpoint threshold to make
sure the vehicle has a chance to really get off the ground.
- calculate ramp slope from initialization setpoint to the desired one
instead from zero to the desired. this ramps up quicker when you demand
a very small upwards velocity like the AutoLineSmoothVel and
ManualPositionSmoothVel tasks do at the beginning.
- don't stay in the takeoff ramp depending on the land detector, this
is unnecessary.
The comments and variable names were partly misleading.
I grouped all members, hopefully gave them more
understandable names and adjusted the comments.
There were two rather confusing function calls one to check
if smooth takeoff needs to be ran and one that updates it.
I combined them and documented the interface correctly
making the parameters non-reference const floats.
This tries to make the visibility.h header clearer and better
structured. We don't actually need the ifdef for lockstep enabled or
disabled because that's now handled elsewhere.
GCC 9 complained about stringop-truncation which is a cautionary message
to prevent using strncpy with non-null terminated strings.
We can fix this by copying one byte less than the destination size and
then manually adding the null termination, as we already do.
visibility.h is included globally in PX4 via cmake compile flags.
It contains poisoning the exit() command which is used by gtest
to close the test application. Removing the flag for gtest compilation
fixes the compile error:
gtest.cc:4757:7: error: attempt to use poisoned "exit"
* VTOL trans: changed that now in transition for both MC and FW the corresponding (correct) attitude controller is running
* attitude setpoint for stabilized mode is generated by tailsitter.cpp
* reset yaw setpoint during transition to avoid big yaw errors after
transition back to hover
* VT_TYPE parameter: added "reboot required" metadata
To be able to still infer the direction of the thrust vector we
limit it to a minimal length even if MPC_THR_MIN is set to zero.
Note: This is a hotfix for certain specific applications.
The direction of the thrust vector in this corner case is very
likely to get into the tilt limit which is generally undesired.
A low gyro cutoff is needed for most medium/large size drones as the structural natural and blade-pass frequencies are low.
A higher value is still desirable for small platforms surch as racers
or well isolated autopilots and should be tuned by the user.
Specific values for config files are untouched.
The cutoff filter for the D term is disabled here as the required
cutoff frequency for the default D term of the rate controller is higher
than the gyro cutoff. In that case, enabling the D term cutoff would
just add some undesired phase lag to the derivative.
Daniel Agar