Px4 Helicopter Support?

PX4 Autopilot
1

I’ve got a lot of experience with px4 for MC and FW, but have never implemented it with a helicopter. I’ve been doing some upfront research and am beginning to wonder if px4 supports helicopters at all any more. It seems the new dynamic control allocation with 1.14 basically ignores it. And I don’t see any posts on helicopters after say 2021. Maybe I’m wrong.

Anyways, would be great to hear from anyone with more experience if helicopter configurations are still supported, preferably in 1.14. I’m actually looking to build out a chinook style tandem - with dual full swashplates, constant rpm - which I know is not supported, but I could start with a single heli and some thoughts on where to start on modifying code or otherwise. It kind of seems like I should be able to build out a new “ActuatorEffectivenessChinook” but any thoughts would be great. Thanks in advance!

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So, the 1.14 release notes say that it is compatible with QGC >= 4.2.0, but I guess not for the heli. I updated from 4.2.4 to 4.2.8 and now see the ‘Generic Helicopter’ option (before only blade 130 or something) and I see the proper Actuators page corresponding to this - and the corresponding parms in the parameters tab. So, I know now that helicopters were not completely left in the dust.

I’m still looking for thoughts on implementing the chinook style config. A couple things I’m noting in ActuatorEffectivenessHelicopter is that 1) there is a hardcoded SP0, indicating it’s not set up for multiple swashplates and 2) there is no location indicator. Thanks again in advance.

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Hey @hanzichi, welcome to the forum!

There is helicopter support also on control allocation. Honestly I’ve never used the old mixers for helicopters but the basic functionality was ported and we improved it since then after doing multiple helicopter integrations.

For reference:

  • First implementation for control allocation:
  • Support for Helis with mechanically coupled tail rotor (I’ve not flown such a vehicle yet):
  • Support for coaxial helicopters:
  • Saturation logic fixes that I have to check if they were backported to 1.14:

I hope this helps. Two swashplates we have to my knowledge not looked into before but it would be cool if you contribute that part.

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And of course the docs state that control allocation is supported: Helicopter Configuration | PX4 User Guide (v1.14)

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