Ardupilot.org

Mentors: Student: Peter Hall

<p>For this GSoC project I propose to expand rover's sailboat functionality, allowing it to move from 'that's cool' to something that can do useful work. I hope once this project is complete rover based sailboats will be the ideal tool for long endurance, long range missions on large pieces of water, be it for mapping large areas or taking measurements at specific locations. The new code will result in a robust controller capable of moving efficiently from A to B in a wide range of wind speeds and sea states.</p>

Mentors: Student: Akshath Singhal

<p>While MAVProxy serves as a fully-functional cross-platform portable ground control station software, the system lacks the presence of a Graphical User Interface making it more difficult to use as compared to other GCS like Mission Planner, QGroundControl etc. Also, the GCS can be improved by the addition of some modules to replace the commonly used cumbersome terminal commands. A major deliverable of this project would be the addition of a UI based parameter handling module with incremental search capabilities. With a recent increase in the number of users, academic researchers and developers working on swarms and multi-vehicle simultaneous control; a new module providing a few high-level commands to all the vehicles or to individual vehicles with a GUI based environment can potentially serve as a good addition to the GCS.</p>

Mentors: Student: Rajat Singhal

<p>AirSim is an open-source, cross-platform simulator for drones and cars, built on Unreal 3D Engine. It provides physically and visually realistic simulations with popular flight controllers such as PX4 using either Software-In-The-Loop (SITL) or Hardware-In-The-Loop (HITL). It is generally used for testing software &amp; for generating large amounts of visual data which is essential for tasks such as Deep Learning &amp; Reinforcement Learning for autonomous drones &amp; vehicles.</p> <p>Over the next few months, in Google Summer of Code, I will add support for Airsim simulator for Ardupilot’s SITL and increase the scope and applicability of Ardupilot in today's emerging fields of autonomous vehicles. This will involve creating the required backend for the communication between Airsim &amp; Ardupilot, implementing lock-step scheduling for accurate simulation and creating documentation, demo videos &amp; sample programs for the same.</p>

Mentors: Student: Matthew Kear

<p>My primary goal is to develop autonomous autorotation capability for traditional helicopters running ArduPilot. The ability to autonomously detect a power failure and safely execute an autorotation will add a greater level of redundancy to the ArduCopter firmware. This will aid in making traditional helicopters safer to operate, reducing the risk of harm/damage to people, property, and the unmanned vehicle itself.<br> My secondary goal is to develop the functionality without loss of generality, maintaining its applicability to all helicopters. Contained within this proposal is a review of previous work done by others. Following this, preliminary investigations show that main rotor head momentum is a critical factor. A methodology is proposed to scale a generic velocity trajectory using the main rotor head momentum in hover. The trajectory will be empirically determined through SITL and real-life testing. The resulting flight mode will provide a robust approach to completing an autorotation manoeuvre for any helicopter. An overview plan of how development time will be allocated, over the GSoC period, is presented. Finally, a short section detailing my background follows.</p>

Mentors: Student: Nguyen Hoang Thien

<p>In this proposal, I would like to contribute new functionalities to the ArduPilot codebase to better utilize VIO tracking camera data for accurate localization and navigation, hence freeing up resources for the companion computer to perform other high-level tasks, as well as documentation with step-by-step hardware and software integration procedure for real-life experiments, so that anybody can follow and even more amazing applications can be developed in the future.</p>