This week, I worked with Sid and Vedant on integrating everything together and debugging issues with drone communications. We faced a lot of strange setbacks this week. In the previous week, we were able to easily control the drone with remote control and even control the drone via code. This week, both of these features broke down: remote control of the drone suddenly stopped working, and the drone ignored our flight commands through code.
Besides debugging, Sid and I set up a thread-based motion planner to account for slow planning times. Our drone requires motion commands at 2Hz, or one message every 0.5 seconds. Our motion plan originally took upwards of 17 seconds to solve for, and after various tricks with reducing planning horizon and floating precision from 64-bit down to 16-bit, we achieved planning on the order of 0.7 seconds. With our thread-based plan generation, the main planner can stream a previously generated trajectory at the required rate as a separate thread solves for a new trajectory.
Overall, the resulting plans from these flat system dynamics still resulted in somewhat shaky behavior, and we eventually used Sid’s more stable planning over x/y space.
For the upcoming week, I am completely booked with other classes, so we may end up sticking with what we have: all functional systems in simulation, but only manual flight on the physical drone. If we get lucky and the drone accepts our autonomous control, maybe we’ll have a full product.