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Armadillo Aerospace: Boosted hop
We changed our A/D from the AccessIO board to a Diamond-MM-32-AT PC104 A/D board. Hopefully this one won’t give us as many problems. We also went back to a dedicated battery for the actuators, instead of sharing it with the main power supply. I couldn’t fit another big battery on the electronics board, so I had to mount it remotely.
On Tuesday we did eight hover tests trying to reduce the back and forth swaying in position hold a bit. The variables that go into the control equation are angular position, angular rate, angular acceleration (not currently used), inertial velocity, and inertial position. After trying variations on all the parameters, it turns out my initial guess worked best. Next day analysis showed that while the initial ratios of parameters were probably pretty close to right, the total scaling of all the parameters could be increased quite a bit before hitting the maximum slew rate of the actuators. I added a new parameter that globally scaled all the tipping parameters, and set it to 1.25 to boost everything up a bit.Read More
A Very nice picture http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_05_30/flight_5.jpg
There're also 2 movies available, windyhover.mpg and boostedhop.mpg

posted by Sigurd @ 5/31/2004 02:47:00 AM