PX4 Dev Call: May 13, 2020

May 13, 2020

Agenda

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

Join Meeting

Meeting ID: 946 175 205
Join using your mobile/desktop

Call in using your phone, find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/aetSYKbiMF


PX4 Virtual Developer Summit July 6 & 7

New website live: https://px4.io/virtual-2020/

Everyone in the community has the opportunity to have a 30 minutes slot for a talk or video. Get in touch and we might even adjust the schedule if it doesn’t fit your content.

Sales pitches for your product are not welcome. We are looking for technical content to help the community cooperate on the open-source projects.

Presentations can be in your native language and there will be regional content e.g. in China.

Ideas for content:

  • Community tour: All the platforms, tools, places to find information and work together. Easy entry.
  • How to set up: Software and Hardware how to get started.
  • Hands-on tuning guide.
  • Presentation of specific components.

There will be a real developer summit planned again when the global health situation is over.

Component update

Flight Testing

Still no official test team. We are trying to get a replacement soon.

System Architecture

All messages that are sent to the ground

OS / NuttX

@david_s5 NuttX made a new release 9.0.0, we didn’t test it yet.

Driver

Bosch sensors BMI55/88 tweaks to only publish valid data and have gyro and accel data synchronized.

There was a bug of the estimated gyro bias getting subtracted twice from the measurement.

Commander

No updates

Estimation

From @kamilritz: Enables usage of body position reference frame for VIO usage.

Our release blocking issue seems to be solved on master. We’re not exactly sure what made the difference.

MAVLink

This needs to be reverted. It’s deprecating frame types that we use and are replacing already deprecated other ones.

VTOL

Fixed Wing

Issue from release testing. Rudder wheel track

Multicopter

Workaround for acceleration feed-forward interfering with existing takeoff ramp logic.

Handle estimator attitude resets in between estimation change and new setpoint from position controller:

Optional setpoint filtering for Manual/Stabilized mode:

MAVSDK

C++ autogeneration is finished. @TSC21 contributed a feature for calibration.

Releases!
MAVSDK v0.26.0
MAVSDK v0.25.0
MAVSDK-Java v0.3.1
MAVSDK-Python coming tomorrow

Make sure to check out the release notes which will greatly simplify adaption work to new versions!

MAVROS / RTPS / ROS2

No updates

Avoidance

No updates

Simulation

MAVSDK CI test failure rate in CI is quite high.

  • @JulianOes was looking into it. There seem to be connection issues to simulation that he couldn’t reproduce locally. It could because by the dynamic multiple world spawning change.

  • @kamilritz Knows about the “ground truth” issue where the EKF sets local position true just at the beginning and if it takes off with the false flag

  • @Jaeyoung-Lim : sitl_gazebo update results in a failure. It seems to be only offboard attitude control. Strange because the changes should not change the result. We need to check

UAVCAN

  • @TSC21 The DS-015 UAVCAN Drone Standard RFC should be closed this week so the respective DSDL files can be written to mirror the messages on the spec.
  • Progress by @dagar in the UAVCAN v1 integration in PX4 can be followed in:

e.g. bridging certain messages like battery status between UAVCAN v1 and uORB

There’s a drone specific UAVCAN weekly call. “UAVCAN Drone” on Tuesday in https://www.dronecode.org/calendar/. Any cooperation and help is appreciated. There’s a general (non donre specific) UAVCAN dev call on Wednesday. There’s a lot of progress at the moment.

Roadmap, and Release discussion

PX4 v1.11.0-beta2 is out

Post your test flight logs on: PX4 1.11 Beta is here! Community Testing Week Starts Today!

Please help us testing and make sure everything you care about works as expected in the release. If you don’t know what to test there are prepared test cards available here: https://dev.px4.io/master/en/test_and_ci/test_flights.html

Community Q&A

Noone raised a question.

In-Depth discussions

Gliding / Airspeed prioritization for fixed wing flight

@Jaeyoung-Lim We want to have fixed wing gliding and soaring control be available from offboard. Instead of making a new setpoint type the idea is to have a special e.g. negative mission throttle interpreted as command to glide so TECS prioritizes airspeed over holding altitude. Is that viable? @dagar We only need to check if any existing functionality interferes.

@sfuhrer How about enabling the feature for RC controlled flight? It would be useful to have a mode where it’s impossible to stall the vehicle but have manual control over throttle. @dagar wanted to enable that a long time ago since some commercial planes offer that as the lowest level operator proof mode.

@Jaeyoung-Lim The airplane in SITL does not stall. Default simulation environment will need to change for fixed-wing. How about using JSBSim as the headless simulator and use FlightGear as the visualization. SITL gazebo for fixed wing requires a lot of manual improvements since the lift/drag model does not account for stalling, zero angle of attack results in zero drag… It will not easily have good dynamics.


Errata and Feedback

Let me know below if I failed to capture anything the right way, and if there are any updates, or you have feedback on the call format.