MAV-blog

I’ve been working on 2 things lately (past few months, I didn’t have a lot of time in the last few weeks):

• New autopilot module

• Glass cockpit framework

This demo combines both of them:

• Simple waypoint editing in the first seconds on the video
• KML file viewing

• Uav simulation: the navigation and control is done on the autopilot module. Sensor data comes from a simulated airplane model on the PC, servo positions are sent back to the PC. In manual mode, the autopilot module forwards the inputs from my RC transmitter. In autopilot mode, it will circle the home position (I should tune it better).

This HILS (Hardware-in-the-loop simulation) idea came to my mind after seeing Jordi’s great demo.

Technologies used:

• Microsoft Virtual Earth for the maps (I also have a class for Google maps, but Google doesn’t seem to like us ripping their tiles).
• WPF (a .NET 3.5 technology) is a graphics framework that does most of the rendering on the video hardware (not loading the CPU).
• C for the dsPic on the autopilot module
• General C#.NET for the airplane modeling

• The windows application is completely OO. The view area consists of layers, all deriving from a base layer class. All layers have a model too. When the workspace is saved, the models are persisted to disk. This pure OO approach makes serveral transitions easy. For example I can switch between a .NET autopilot or a hardware autopilot class without affecting any other code.