The week before Fall Break, I spent quite a bit of time on the design report. This included writing a lot regarding the system architecture as well as some of the principal design choices we made regarding the hardware and software of the drone. Additionally, I realized there was a huge problem in the formulation of the kalman filter (essentially in our state update step we were doing a double integration of acceleration to retrieve position, however this is especially error prone to drift and highly not recommended). As a result, I changed the formulation of the kalman filter to include the linear and angular velocity in our state which should make our state estimation a whole lot more stable.
I am currently behind because of this additional work that was needed for the kalman filter but this sort of learning and iteration was expected given that we are designing our own control system and state estimation. I’m hoping to finish up all kalman filter stuff this week then move onto to final integration onto the drone specifically regarding tuning the PID loops. Now that we have hardware in hand, this sort of functional testing is possible and we will be focusing on this over the next several weeks until the demo in November.