PX4 Maintainers Call: May 02, 2023

:calendar: May 02, 2023

The maintainers meeting is a meeting for the developer team to coordinate on pressing issues and to plan the development of the PX4 Autopilot project, the community is welcome to join and listen, but won’t be able to speak unless specific access is granted ahead of time.

:selfie: Meeting Link

:notebook_with_decorative_cover: Agenda

  • Flight Blender Proposal to Join Dronecode Foundation
  • v1.14 Release
  • uORB units specification

:memo: Meeting Notes

Flight Blender Proposal to Join Dronecode Foundation

Presenters

Presentation Notes

  • UTM: Regulation enabling BVLOS flights
  • For different functionalities (e.g. Registration, Geo-fencing, etc) different standards are being introduced
  • Reason for call: TII was planning to incorporate it into QGC
  • Proposal: By having Flight blender included into Dronecode, it can introduce the UTM standards to QGC. Small Working Group (3 ~ 6 months) to try out the integration.

Discussions

  • Hirishi was interested in donating the project to Dronecode, and Chris recommended connecting with PX4 team
  • When does it become relevant for the mass audience? (Daniel): In the EU the regulation has been passed, for certain areas for BVLOS flights, this will be necessary. It is hard to predict EU’s future decisions.
  • What is OpenSky? (Daniel): Open source products, business model is in 1) customization, 2) integration of the system, 3) hosting service. Products are: Flight blender & Front-end.
  • Difference with Airmap? (Jay):
  • Why don’t you become a UTM provider? (Jay): OpenSkies is quite small. And for now a lot of things (e.g. Business model) is unclear.

More about UTM: https://www.faa.gov/uas/research_development/traffic_management

Action Items

  • Working Group will be formulated & MVP (QGC plugin) will be created

v1.14 Release Coordination

Project board: PX4 v1.14 Release · GitHub

Release blockers:

:point_right: Please update the release notes draft sheet!

Proposal: uORB units specification

In the last Community QnA call, daniel raised an initiative to clarify the units in the uORB messages.

Context: Farhang was having trouble migrating from v1.13 to v1.14, for uORB message definitions (e.g. failsafe flags in vehicle status has changed it’s definition). This points to the fact that uORB messages are not documented well inside the .msg file, neither it’s units.

Other Questions

In “mc_position_control/PositionControl/PositionControl.cpp”, the function “_accelerationControl()” should transform the acceleration setpoint into a thrust setpoint. Is there any documentation/paper about that? I’m trying to write the equations of the controllers for a paper that I’m working on and I can’t understand that part from the code.