PX4 Dev Call: October 16, 2019

October 16th, 2019

Agenda

  • Overall status update high level
  • Status update by component
  • What got merged last week
  • What’s still in the queue for this week
    • Blockers
  • Release v1.10
  • Community members who want to help
  • Open section for the community

Join Meeting

Meeting ID: 946 175 205
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Call in using your phone, find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/aetSYKbiMF

Participating attendees

  • Julian Oes
  • Ramón Roche
  • Daniel Agar
  • Matthias Grob
  • Bazooka Joe
  • Beat
  • Jaeyoung Lim
  • Jonas Vautherin
  • Julian Kent
  • Mark Sauder
  • Martina
  • Mathieu
  • Silvan Fuhrer
  • Tanja
  • Yannick Fuhrer
  • Jacob Crabill

High-Level update

  • Working on v1.10 release and release blockers
  • Changelog generated
  • New beta out.

Component update

Comms - Beat /Julian

VTOL - Silvan

  • Airspeed selector follow up. Hopefully should go into the release
  • Control allocation discussion is happening, will be shared more broadly soon.
  • Tailsitter initialization issue, follow up issue that we had in the past. v1.9 smooth takeoff was broken, thrust has to be zero when you arm for smooth takeoff. Therefore, setpoint is reset while disarmed, side effect for VTOL was fixed, now another side effect for tailsitter (https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/pull/13210).
    Daniel: can we run all controllers all the time.
    Matthias: yes but we need to make sure no integrators wind up, and check some other corner cases.
    Daniel: that way we can see the CPU usage.
  • Fixed bank loiter fix: https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/pull/12778

Fixed Wing - Silvan

no update

Multicopter - Mathieu / Matthias

  • Attitude controller: refactoring: move rate controller out of module. Matthias found weaknesses in interface, and found that TPA is not used.
  • Failsafe: if you lose baro, it is untested.
    Matthias: solve it in both ways: controller should always do something sane, and not crash. But then also we need proper config in the state machine.

OS / NuttX

Commander - Julian

Commander update:

Driver - Mark Sauder

  • Mark: Tfmini+ is broken, Mark will check the Tfmini (standard)
  • Mark: Basic functionality to have multiple instances of the lidarlite driver
  • Daniel: Invensense 20602: new driver for SPI with max rate data at 4 khz accel, 8 khz gyro, good for airframes aliasing and clipping.

System Architecture

  • SubscriptionBlocking -> will replace poll usage, and then we can deprecate old wrapper.
  • ModuleBase to do multiple instances of modules cleanly, needs some more work.
  • Temperature compensation.
  • Events/temperature calibration: Jake helped move it to the side to save flash (16kB).

Avoidance - Martina / Tanja

  • Added code coverage
  • Moved models to sitl_gazebo because they depend on sitl_gazebo so it’s easier to update
  • (Something else that I missed) @mrivi?
  • ecl: gtest is added to write tests, without the need for Python tests
  • Julian has PR for automatic differentiation: partial derivatives in EKF.
  • Daniel: ecl Pytest: does anyone care? Julian Kent: Kamil is porting it to gtest.
    Daniel: codecov is already available for ecl through Jenkins codecov.

MAVROS / RTPS / ROS2

no update

Testing - Anthony

no update

Documentation

  • Matthias: Arch install script is available.
    Daniel: we should add a docker container and get it into CI.
  • Matthias VSCode: VSCode is nicely set-up by Daniel now. And documented now.
  • Daniel: VSCode on Windows: do work with WSL (except graphics)

What got merged last week

Top Posts on forums last week

What’s still in the queue for this week

This is the section where we discuss open PRs / Issues

-> Nothing this week, it’s all about the release

Release v1.10

  • What’s missing for release?
  • Can we do a feature freeze now?
  • Release branch, that needs to be continuously tested until release
  • Master now becomes 1.11
  • Can we tag the RC?
  • Release team
  • Release blockers: https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/projects/17

.

  • Tracked here: https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/projects/17
  • Land detector, what can we do? https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/issues/13124
    BazookaJoe: probably there is no hotfix. However, when hovering it should not try to detect landing.
  • High CPU usage on Cube with VTOL: https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/issues/13149
    Daniel: should we stay at a conservative rate control loop settings or change the default?
    Mark: the default gains on a 250 frame are not great.
    Mark: has over driven motors and burnt them out. Matthias: in that case the filtering is not set right and noise is amplified.
    Daniel: takeaway, for now run rate control loop for VTOL at 400 Hz only.
  • Holybro ESC: https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/issues/13147
    Matthias: “works for us”
    Daniel: Saw one that probably got recalibrated somehow.
    Julian: if we find something concrete we can get it into the release.
  • Fixedwing pitch setpoints: Daniel: needs to check with Roman, if it can be wrapped up it will make the release, otherwise not

-> Aiming at creating the release branch end of this week! So, next week master is “open” again.

Community members who want to help

If any active community member would like to form part of the maintenance team please sign-up on the following form

Open section for the community

Matthias:
Mark: get_param, find_param PR for the release:

Notes by @JulianOes.

Followup https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/issues/12071
Discuss https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/issues/13087
Discuss https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/pull/12072
Discuss https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/issues/13148

Let’s also discuss the “Looking for” forum boards

Release tag v1.10.0-beta3 was created a few hours ago by @dagar I made a preliminary change log for the team to discuss.

What to look for

  • any missing feature/bugfix/change, please report anything missing
  • review all the changes, and mark those which are new functionality
  • help us identify the high level features that should be included in the release notes

@JulianOes avoidance CI in Firmware is fixed and up and running

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