PX4 Dev Call: August 26, 2020

📞 Coordination Calls PX4 Autopilot Coordination
1

August 26, 2020

Agenda

  • Status update by component/project
  • Roadmap, and Release discussion
  • Community Q&A
  • In-Depth discussions

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Meeting ID: 946 175 205
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Component update

Hardware Workgroups

Hardware call was yesterday

  • FMU-v5X DS-011 standard spec is close to the final release (current version 0.5) todo list is almost worked off
  • If you’re interested join the Pixhawk SiG.

System Architecture

Now you can have 4 of each sensor class calibrated. Some were limited to 3. Also there distinguishing for external sensors available now.

Get GPS aggregation and blending out of EKF into the sensors module. Good questions in the pending review. It’s a good time to address those questions about the original architecture now.

OS / NuttX

NuttX update: @david_s5 has it passing CI and is quite far. He considers it ready and was waiting for the release to go out. The release is branched off so it’s fine as soon as we have all main supported boards verified.

Some backports were merged on NuttX e.g. RTR is possible without defines now.

Driver

@dagar added a driver ICM42605 TDK IMU

Rewrites for some magnetometers. They handle reset scenario better. The rotations will be as close a possible to the datasheet. Internal rotations are handheld like before. The external rotation assumption magic is going out. There’s now an automatic rotation detection during calibration for external mags.

Commander

Needs review:

Estimation

:dizzy: Updates
There’s now a change indicator detecting any functional change for the yaw estimator used for emergencies. So we can refactor it without the fear of breaking the existing functionality.

Get away from using sensor combined but have the individual accel and gyro messages only.

The multi EKF pr is getting closer to a mergeable state where the default is what we have but you can opt-in to using multiple EKFs and have a voter decide on what output is best.

:zap:Matlab->Python EKF derivation migration completed.
@Paul_Riseborough completed the last bit and everything is now replaced with PySym derivation output. The outcome is except for numerical differences the same.

Benefits include:

  • It’s much faster to derive
  • you don’t need a Matlab license
  • it’s lower CPU load and memory footprint.

Here’s the full list of PRs in the project

VTOL

No update

Fixed Wing

No update

Multicopter

No update

Avoidance

No update

Simulation

SITL tests run a bit better now but still not perfect. This pr improved it:
Problem was that the land detector detected landing during descend. @Jaeyoung-Lim found a better thrust value for the simulated model.

The MAVROS mission and the safe landing test are still failing. Discussion about next steps to solve the issues and have CI always passing if there was nothing broken in a pr to avoid people ignoring the result. There will be more insights with the failsafe injection. @JulianOes is working to get that in.

Ping to the VTOL team. @Jaeyoung-Lim tried to fix the tiltrotor but it kept on failing. It would be nice if someone from VTOL control could look into it.

Separate out HIL interface such that it doesn’t need to be implemented and maintained for each simulator we support but resides in a standalone library.

MAVSDK

A lot of small fixes, similar problems like on the PX4 sitl tests.

Thanks to NicolasM0 for contributing a Windows COM connections fix.

Allows one set of complex mission item to be exported from QGC and uploaded to the autopilot. But there’s no API apart from importing and uploading. It complains it doesn’t understand the content.

Time sync is now an opt-in feature and disabled by default because there were issues when wasn’t actually in use.

MAVROS / DDS / ROS2

This year ROScon is not happening but there’s ROS World 2020 and we’ll take part, meet the ROS community, present our ecosystem: ROS World 2020

That’s the first time we’re as close to the ROS community. We plan to take part in next year’s ROS con.

UAVCAN

No updates this week. The standard is being further settled. Please look into the ESC messages of the DS-015 document. They are close to getting fixed

TODO @rroche: Add DS-015 document.

Release

v1.11 close to the stable release. We feel good about the stability. Do we have insights from flight review on testing frequency?

@rroche Is preparing a changelog and layout for the blog post. It would be nice if the maintainers could make sure the release highlights are capturing the important changes.

Community Q&A

@rroche: Some community members can’t join this dev call because Zoom is banned from certain company network configurations. We look into switching to Microsoft Teams, Jitsi or maybe Google Meets. @rroche will do some tests and post open test meetings on the #dev-call channel on slack.

In-Depth discussions

Took place in between the updates.

Errata and Feedback

Let me know below if we failed to capture anything the right way, and if there are any updates (not present here), or you have feedback you would like to share with the dev-team.

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