I remember being in primary school i used to spend all day after school watching your videos. I loved seeing you experiment with fpv and seeing you build your own planes. I just graduated high school and your channel is perhaps the only one i’ve stuck with for so long and that i still enjoy. You’ve come a long way and I hope i’ll get to witness your creations for many more years to come.
Lift in m/s, speed in m/s, alt in ft, current in A, wind speed in mph. You guys are driving me nuts. Aside from that, awesome! Really interesting. The future is here :)
@Harald Lindohf electrical current (A) should be the only unit (besides Volt and Watt) where America and Europe agree with the rest of the world, right?
It's even more chaos. Gliders in Germany fly by speed: km/h, lift: m/s, altitude: meters. But in navigation charts we have: elevation of airspaces in feet or flight levels, vertical distance from clouds in feet, horizontal distance from clouds in km. Then we fly together with motor airplanes that use speed in knots (nautical miles per hour) and feet for altitude. Magical it all works most of the time.
Hi, last summer our solar powered glider flew 14.30 hrs and 650km with this feature. We didn't use thermal hunting because it seems to fly away but the min and max altitude helps to save energy. Apparently, it's better to spend more power during a shorter time than a constant low current to maintain a constant altitude.
I think that the issue with the drifting down wind was that your loiter mode is just flying a turn rate, not tracking location. The elongated loops are because the change from upwind to downwind and back with no turn rate compensation to fly in an actual circle. I skydive and it's something we have to learn how to deal with to get where we want to go.
Thanks for making this video! To prevent it from getting too far downwind you have two options 1) geofence, as some have mentioned 2) set up an RC channel using the SOAR_ENABLE_CH parameter, to inhibit thermalling when you want it to continue on mission. The feature is still under development and there are some improvements on the way.
I think you know, but a trick to stay in the thermal is: if the lift increases turn less and if the lift decreases turn more. and the more it decreases more turns. in that way you are getting closer and closer to the center of the thermal. I love your videos, thanks for sharing.
Wow, can't believe the tech like this is at the hobby level now...amazing. Just getting back into RC after 10+ years, amazed at how cheap stuff has gotten, and how GOOD the expensive stuff is! My very first experience with an electric was a buddy's hand-launch 3-ch glider with a Speed 400 direct drive motor (w. folding prop of course) and had JUST enough NiCD juice to climb ONE time and circle back down to Earth. We quickly realized without at least 2 or 3 batteries it took longer to ride bikes to the airfield than any actual enjoyment time!
There is a very simple algorithm for thermalling, and looking at your track, it seems to be what your flight controller is using (or, at least very similar). 1. When first encountering lift, wait some period (we use 3 seconds in paragliding), then initiate a turn (it seems your controller defaults left). 2. While lift increases, loosen the turn radius (up to some preset maximum). 3. While lift decreases, tighten the turn radius (down to some preset minimum). 4. If there is no lift, wait some period and then return to mission mode.
I'm not convinced any systemic thermal-finding was achieved here; If that was the algorithm, then this is just cutting wide circles relative to the wind, ignoring GPS location-holding, and turning when its momentum points it upwind (which induces lift). The planform is just so damn efficient (when it's free to cut wide aerodynamic ellipses instead of being brutally mishandled by manual controllers like you or I whose every input is enthusiastically aerobatic) that it loses almost no altitude anyway.
@@TrogdorBurnin8or Turning "upwind" with an un-powered glider is meaningless, apart from speed-over-ground and produces no additional lift. For a given attack angle, the glider will fly a constant speed through the air, regardless of whether that air is stationary, or blowing 20 miles per hour. What will change is the speed relative to the ground below. The glide slope will also be constantly pointing downward, unless rising air (a thermal) provides surplus lift.
@@TrogdorBurnin8or If you watch the path and climb rate (helps to run at 0.25 speed) from about 5:10 you can see that, when the climb rate is up around 4, or 5 m/s (over the road, buildings, parking lots, mown lawn, etc., which tend to be pretty good thermal triggers) the loops are more 'open' and when the climb drops near zero (over the trees, exactly where you would expect there to be less thermal activity), the loops tighten. This is why I commented that it appears that the algorithm is similar to what I outlined above (loosen turn radius in increasing lift and tighten turns in decreasing lift). I would assume there is some averaging, to smooth out some of the 'noise' in the altitude measurement, but generally when I see tighter turns, the climb rate is somewhere between 1 and -1 and when the climb rate goes above 4, the loops open up, as I would expect.
Try adding solar cells to the wing to see if it improves flight duration. Try adding ground object recognition via live video feed. Then add ground object location coordinate triangulation from the aircrafts GPS co-ordinates.
I am the reigning king of non-technical, so 99.9% of whatever you say goes in one ear and out the other. Still, I really enjoy watching your videos. Thanks for all your efforts.
So great to see you utilising this tech. A good reference to the good egg that figured this out would be nice but I understand your focus. Ridge lift is always going to be lift so figuring out an algorithm to quantify that should take some effort. It warms my heart to watch this stuff.
This is the one time I could have helped you lol LOVE THIS TY @3DR @aurdo and @apm for the Pixhawk and the devs I love this software for my filming rig!
I've been thermalling the same ASW-28 for years (by eye and with a vario). It works very well once you get the hang of it. From the KML file it looks like you were half in and half out of the thermal. On one side of the loops you were rising, and on the other side you were sinking. It's not enough just to circle when you detect a thermal, you've got to constantly adjust the turning radius to stay in it, otherwise it will just spit you out. Good idea to go to a large open area like a desert, a couple of days out there will really up your thermal skills, enough to let you tune the autonomous mode a fair bit better.
There is a setting called a geofence that is essentially a digital fence that doesn’t let your plane leave the area. Don’t know if it would work for this but I have used it for autonomous search missions and it works great!
Watvching this vid I am impressed with how much knoweledge there is ahead of me, as I am just making my first steps in RC motorised gliders. Fantastic, stimulating, educative content. Keep up the good work!
Love to watch these autonomous vehicles you make. It looks like the day you are flying, the atmosphere is very stable. Try it again on a day with a few cumulous clouds around, mid afternoon. I've caught great thermals during my hang gliding days. Cheers!
I've been flying RC since the late eighties and the technology keeps growing by leaps and bounds. I always like to do my aerobatics without gyros or mixing and my soaring on slope lift the same and search lift by eye. Occasionally a thermal drifts into the slope on light lift days and is usually evidenced by seagulls or pelicans. I once got in lift with a huge golden eagle. That was wind shear lift flying near Davenport CA across from big creek lumber. Unbelievably strong with an unlimited ceiling but a very turbulent bottom that was about 500 ft elevation and really difficult to get into. I was flying a Bob Martin sr7 that I had for twenty years and had an amazing amount of countless hours flying. That thing was and still is unbelievable IMHO
Wow, the low flying over the hill with trees was reeeeally sketchy imo, dude you're the king of RC for me. I wanna try everything you make but this is whole new league of wallet/time killer. Love it!
At 13:45 you see the air going down, even is ground level is going up (ridge). This seems to be caused by the cooler air over the trees. The air is going in up over the valley, which causes air to be drawn from the cooler places, in this case the hills with trees. I agree, no thermal bubbles here, just the general air over over the valley rising at the expense of the air over the forests.
Finally someone took the trouble to try it out. Thanks for the video. Suggestion: Wouldn't a geofence with a few rallies be helpful against the plane leaving?
As a pilot, I would suggest the following... When your plane got to the trees it would sink because of the air around trees being an average of 10 degrees lower than the surrounding air. So at the beginning of the slope (where the air hit the hill and trees) you had the maximum lift. Can you program the thing to stay and go back and forth in the spot where you hit maximum lift? Like set a number for the lift you are seeking and GPS-like stay there? Your "autonomous" lift seeking thing is just looking for the minimum up and drifting in that direction into lower lift areas that still meet the minimum lift requirement. When it starts getting a lower lift it should turn back to the maximum lift spot, right? Love your videos, thanks for sharing... bye
If you haven't already, look into the "forward slip" technique for slowing without flaps using the rudder and opposite aileron. Works really well once you get it down.
Looks like a hoot. I'm ancient enough to remember going from analog to digital (pcm) RC, not to mention the "galloping ghost". lol. Thermals are generated by heated ground, the darker the better, ridge lift is an uplifting from the wind caused by the ridge, it would need to fly parallel to the ridge. (used to hang glide too. lol). Need to look further into this. Thanks for the effort you took putting this together!
Just wonderful man, looking forward to watch your superb experiments, .... Start feeling I'll need to install Ardu on my Matek FC, moving from INAV, and realy get into Ardu and all theses beautifull fonctions. keep soaring and many thanks for sharing
Great video! I had just ordered an ASW28 from HK, then I see this video on TH-cam! I think the Phoenix 2400 would work better. You can get a PNF version on banggood for $130. It is a great plane. I flew it for 4 hours and 44 minutes using lithium ion batteries. There is a video of it on my channel. Thanks for the awesome videos Daniel!
That's amazing Matthew, did you lower the LVC in the ESC? Must have been mostly thermal flight. Don't know if I care to fly that long all at one sitting. LOL Unless of course in my hang glider.
Yeah, I used a BLheli esc that does not have a LVC. It was running arduplane on a F405 Wing flight controller. I was just there to monitor it. The motor was spinning the whole time. There might have been a little help from thermals, but the flight controller kept the altitude fixed.
If you watch the video you can see that it is picking termals, every time it changes mode you can see the wings lift from the tips, a good sign that its it in a thermal. As you said, a trip to desert will really show you what it does and you can expect to spend a day with it in the air, knowing the total amount of radio contact you have is very important if you want to stay in control as any thermal it finds will shift from one mode to the other and wwithout good radfio contact jit can overide homing programmes.
Please combine with your solar plane! Great work. :) I'm a computer vision and machine learning researcher. If you can think of ways I can help, I'd love to. I think some very simple vision and reinforcement learning could allow it to actively look for likely locations for thermals. Rather than just accidental find them.
I'm pretty sure that your plane was tracking a thermal. If you look at the FPV image, you see that when thermalling, the angle of bank is remaining reasonably constant, with just minor corrections for air turbulence that has upset the glider a little bit. So, it's "centered" on a thermal and managed to stay with the thermal for a reasonable distance. I've got 30 years experience flying 1:1 scale sailplanes. and I say Ardupilot does pretty well as a soaring autopilot.
In the 80’s my grandfather and his friends started Soaring products a company that made the Thermic sniffler. The sniffler would send an audible signal to a radio that the pilot wore on his belt. You were able to hear the thermal. They later sold it to ACE RC. The soaring products snifflers are still highly sought after by glider pilots.
It looks like you have a problem with your current sensor setup. It's not showing the drain from your VTX, receiver, flight controller etc. That means your battery life won't match up. That's especially important for your glider application. Always make sure all of those are behind the current sensor.
I like his efforts, they are great, but.... .... author plays with minuscule amounts of drag on his tailplane yet there is more, MUCH more drag at wing/fuselage joint than the ENTIRE rest of his plane combined.... Its a giant diffuser nozzle...
Challenge. Fly from Chicago to Holland, MI. I think with a UHF you could get it all the way across Lake Michigan. Second, would love to see you get one of these in the jet stream. Nerding out over your videos. Thank you!
Love the technical details. I’d be interested to see if you set your waypoint mission so that it takes you over some elements which are more likely to be generating thermals, like an asphalt flat roof, a road, or a car park.
The thermal was coming from the warm asphalt of the road. That's pretty common for that area. Your peak altitude is just downwind from where the aircraft crossed the road.
To me that looks similar to a paragliding track when in a thermal, you can actually tell if you are falling out of a thermal in paragliding so I'm guessing this does the same thing. Feeling which side of the wing has more life to find the middle of the thermal. Amazing tech
Excellent excellent video. I have two ASW 28s and they are fairly good soaring platforms for the price. Really excited about Ardupilot's thermal hunting feature. I'll squeeze a Matek 405 wing FC in mine in conjunction with a Taranis X9D transmitter and a R9 long range receiver.
The auto thermal mode should have the plane thermal to the right, In the northern hemisphere, thermals usually twist counter clockwise. By doing so, it would enable the plane to stay close to the center of the thermal, where most energy can be found.
You know nothing about soaring. Thermals do have airflow around the center but long established testing has shown that they turn about 50% in either direction. I have over 4,000h in gliders, 40,000mi x-country.
@@LS8eighteen You should've been paying more attention during your flights. Thermals are a localised low pressure areas. In the Northern hemisphere they tend to turn counter clockwise. This is called Coriolis effect. Go and re-read up on your fundamentals of meteorology.
@@fliteshare Coriolis effect is real, but only effects the system if it's significantly large in proportion to the other forces in the system... which it is at large scales, but not at small scales. At small scales, it diminishes to be negligible, which is why, for example, the funnel of water draining through a hole starts spinning in a random direction despite the Coriolis that should be forcing it into the hemisphere-appropriate direction (unless you carefully set up a tub of water with a painstakingly controlled lack of disturbances, like Smarter Every Day and Veritasium did in a collab video, each with a tub of water in opposing hemispheres)
That is so cool. I would love to build a plane like this can can fly to a certain GPS location, circle around take pictures and return keeping at a certain altitude the whole time. I used to fly RC planes years ago but at that time it was all glow engines. With these Lithium batteries and awesome powerful energy efficient motors this hobby is very cool indeed. I look forward to getting back into it.
That was beautiful, buddy. I do think that the powered glider was catching thermals though! consider the black body radiation of the paved road where there was a clear spike in altitude. The road heats the air directly above it well. Also, the forest vs. field data makes sense in terms of thermals because trees transpire and are excellent at absorbing heat and killing thermals. The albedo effect off the fields is notably higher where the heat may be better reflected out.
Dude that is two thermals being tracked right there. You see birds flying in tight circles in thermals that move slowly across the ground exactly like your plane was doing. The ardu definitely works!
Awesome video. When searching for thermals, one of the signs is when the tip of a wing grazes a column of rising air and the plane twitches away from the thermal. The strategy then is to turn opposite to that in order to enter into the thermal. I wonder if the ardupilot algorithms could/does? use IMU data to detect and use this.
have you thought of making a build video?? great set up.did you Laminate the plain?? my ASW 28 is on it's way soon. spare wing, and all the parts to put together one more minus electronics and servos. the second one will be a custom FPV long range platform . THANKS for the inspiration.
Hint: Do not bevel your trailing edges. Contrary to intuition, leaving them with sharp edges is better for drag than rounding them. If they have a very tall vertical edge, you could extend them with a tapered/triangular piece of balsa, resulting in a thin, sharp trailing edge.
I want to get into glidint too, but both my efforts failed - first i got a multiplex easyglider, but i built it so heavy that it never gained altitude without motor, then i got a tiny glider "mini swift" from hobbyking, but it doesnt glide at all too, in fact its kind of a hotliner and it has a very high stall speed and is overall quite fast.
Perhaps give it a more aggressive autotune, it should have cored better. I always fly my mission upwind of me to allow my glider to do most of the climbing as it flies back overhead, until like you, I chicken out! Well done #ArdusoarFTW
Very cool. I'll put that in my Radian and let it fly all day by itself hahaha For the trailing edges, squared off is more efficient unless you make it perfectly straight, stiff, and razor-sharp.
Don't worry about the auto thermal, fly it manually and chase the thermals yourself... it looks like it just reaches the thermal detection vertical speed threshold then just enters loiter and doesn't modify the loiter shape to follow the thermal at all..
I believe it was tracking a thermal but it wasn't climbing very efficiently in the thermal. You might want to restore your flap function and setup a soaring flight mode where the ailerons and flaps drop about 10 degrees. That will make it climb better in the thermals. You can probably make it go in and out of soaring mode programmatically too.
Lower RF frequency for longer wave length produce less propagation loss to any RF up: down link. Half the frequency produce 4x link budget. 900MHz from 2.4GHz gives us 7x link budget. The catch is antenna size is linear proportion larger.
Its wierd, for the whole "thermal hunting" flight segments the vertical speed almost always showed positive, but the altitude steadily decreased and both times the plane ended up way lower then when it started this mode. Also from what i heard, thermals are strongest over fields, and there's really no thermals over forests, and if the hill is not very steep and covered with trees so that would mostly break up ridge lift, so i'm not surprised that it rised over field and sinked over the forest.
I’d like to see a plot of altitude and vertical speed vs. airspeed. Curious if it knows to go fast in sink and slow in thermals. Great video! I have to get my sailplanes out now.
Back when I flew hang gliders...when missing one thermal meant you were likely on the ground...I used to envision a little cluster of soaring drones that helped search for lift. Seems more than possible now.
Nice scenery. Hardanger in Norway is even better. Planning on making a video from there later this year. This system would probably not be able to use updrift caused by mountains? Our mountains rise 1000 meters almost straight up from sea level. Obstacle detection would be nice to add, but I'm not that good at coding. There is an exciting future in autonomous aircraft, specially in laser mapping, forest management and search & rescue. Such a large plane could carry a companion computer (ex. Intel Edison), extra camera-laser systems and SSD storage.
Really interesting! I guess you've already thought about implementing this sistem into your solar plane, maybe with a big battery tossed in. Would be really cool to see if it could achieve enough energy to sustain a 24h flight, wandering in the desert on a sunny day!
Yep - I agree on that one. The m/s climb/descend rate doesn‘t correspond at all with the GPS altitude. Since I think GPS is correct, I assume that your vario meter is installed at a position where it senses pressure changes and of course interprets them as climb/descend, while they‘re actually aerodynamically caused pressure changes and don‘t correspond at all to climb/descend. Try to place the sensor at another position. But very cool project bro! :-).
Your videos never fail to impress me, I can't wait for the next video every time one finishes. Please never stop making videos
SnewL have to agree with you. Many times I have no idea what he’s talking about but he makes it interesting!
I remember being in primary school i used to spend all day after school watching your videos. I loved seeing you experiment with fpv and seeing you build your own planes. I just graduated high school and your channel is perhaps the only one i’ve stuck with for so long and that i still enjoy. You’ve come a long way and I hope i’ll get to witness your creations for many more years to come.
Lift in m/s, speed in m/s, alt in ft, current in A, wind speed in mph. You guys are driving me nuts.
Aside from that, awesome! Really interesting. The future is here :)
That's aviation world in 21th century.
@Harald Lindohf electrical current (A) should be the only unit (besides Volt and Watt) where America and Europe agree with the rest of the world, right?
It's even more chaos. Gliders in Germany fly by speed: km/h, lift: m/s, altitude: meters. But in navigation charts we have: elevation of airspaces in feet or flight levels, vertical distance from clouds in feet, horizontal distance from clouds in km. Then we fly together with motor airplanes that use speed in knots (nautical miles per hour) and feet for altitude. Magical it all works most of the time.
Statute miles or knots?
@@charleslambert3368 there are no statute miles in aviation. There are nautical miles for distance and knots (nautical miles per hour) for speed.
You have to set up a geofence, when the plane hits the boundary in loiter the flight mode changes to RTL. It flies home and then continues the mission
Put the same system on my 550 DJI a few years ago and setup geofencing to keep it from drifting away.
Hi, last summer our solar powered glider flew 14.30 hrs and 650km with this feature. We didn't use thermal hunting because it seems to fly away but the min and max altitude helps to save energy. Apparently, it's better to spend more power during a shorter time than a constant low current to maintain a constant altitude.
Love your videos! Great project. Thanks for the tip, I'll have to try that with my solar plane.
I think that the issue with the drifting down wind was that your loiter mode is just flying a turn rate, not tracking location. The elongated loops are because the change from upwind to downwind and back with no turn rate compensation to fly in an actual circle. I skydive and it's something we have to learn how to deal with to get where we want to go.
I can't wait to see how much you're going to improve this!
Rock-On Dude!
damn robots. First they came for our jobs, now they want also our hobbies
China will eat us alive. Its called competition.
I will not fucking stand for this. Because I’m sitting.
If we could teach them to crash close to good looking girls.. Id be cool with it
XD XD yall are hilarious rofl
It's actually a hobby to make them :)
Thanks for making this video! To prevent it from getting too far downwind you have two options 1) geofence, as some have mentioned 2) set up an RC channel using the SOAR_ENABLE_CH parameter, to inhibit thermalling when you want it to continue on mission. The feature is still under development and there are some improvements on the way.
I think you know, but a trick to stay in the thermal is: if the lift increases turn less and if the lift decreases turn more. and the more it decreases more turns. in that way you are getting closer and closer to the center of the thermal. I love your videos, thanks for sharing.
This is a great video. Awesome to see 3D positioning on a 3D landscape after the flight.
Now, just make it with solar panels, for fully automatic flights, and way to much flite time
i_am_Terom just put the adrupilot on his solar plabe
@@jackjohnson7804 He needs to do this
Here you go. th-cam.com/video/8m4_NpTQn0E/w-d-xo.html
@@TheZindarod Awesome!
Automate your hobbies so you don't have to go through the trouble of flying the plane yourself lmao.
Wow, can't believe the tech like this is at the hobby level now...amazing. Just getting back into RC after 10+ years, amazed at how cheap stuff has gotten, and how GOOD the expensive stuff is!
My very first experience with an electric was a buddy's hand-launch 3-ch glider with a Speed 400 direct drive motor (w. folding prop of course) and had JUST enough NiCD juice to climb ONE time and circle back down to Earth. We quickly realized without at least 2 or 3 batteries it took longer to ride bikes to the airfield than any actual enjoyment time!
That's really an impressive test of the soaring system! He has collected and presented data in an excellent manner
There is a very simple algorithm for thermalling, and looking at your track, it seems to be what your flight controller is using (or, at least very similar).
1. When first encountering lift, wait some period (we use 3 seconds in paragliding), then initiate a turn (it seems your controller defaults left).
2. While lift increases, loosen the turn radius (up to some preset maximum).
3. While lift decreases, tighten the turn radius (down to some preset minimum).
4. If there is no lift, wait some period and then return to mission mode.
I'm not convinced any systemic thermal-finding was achieved here; If that was the algorithm, then this is just cutting wide circles relative to the wind, ignoring GPS location-holding, and turning when its momentum points it upwind (which induces lift). The planform is just so damn efficient (when it's free to cut wide aerodynamic ellipses instead of being brutally mishandled by manual controllers like you or I whose every input is enthusiastically aerobatic) that it loses almost no altitude anyway.
@@TrogdorBurnin8or Turning "upwind" with an un-powered glider is meaningless, apart from speed-over-ground and produces no additional lift. For a given attack angle, the glider will fly a constant speed through the air, regardless of whether that air is stationary, or blowing 20 miles per hour. What will change is the speed relative to the ground below. The glide slope will also be constantly pointing downward, unless rising air (a thermal) provides surplus lift.
@@CineSoar Do you think the figure we're seeing it trace, then, is just "Maintain roll angle at 10 degrees left of center", effectively?
@@TrogdorBurnin8or If you watch the path and climb rate (helps to run at 0.25 speed) from about 5:10 you can see that, when the climb rate is up around 4, or 5 m/s (over the road, buildings, parking lots, mown lawn, etc., which tend to be pretty good thermal triggers) the loops are more 'open' and when the climb drops near zero (over the trees, exactly where you would expect there to be less thermal activity), the loops tighten. This is why I commented that it appears that the algorithm is similar to what I outlined above (loosen turn radius in increasing lift and tighten turns in decreasing lift). I would assume there is some averaging, to smooth out some of the 'noise' in the altitude measurement, but generally when I see tighter turns, the climb rate is somewhere between 1 and -1 and when the climb rate goes above 4, the loops open up, as I would expect.
Dude been amazing watching u through the years and see you not lose any enthusiasm for the Hobby. Thanks for inspiring me to start flying again.
Amazing stuff Daniel. Glad you have the time to keep playing around with RC stuff and keep us entertained. Always enjoy your vids.
Try adding solar cells to the wing to see if it improves flight duration. Try adding ground object recognition via live video feed. Then add ground object location coordinate triangulation from the aircrafts GPS co-ordinates.
I am the reigning king of non-technical, so 99.9% of whatever you say goes in one ear and out the other. Still, I really enjoy watching your videos. Thanks for all your efforts.
So great to see you utilising this tech. A good reference to the good egg that figured this out would be nice but I understand your focus. Ridge lift is always going to be lift so figuring out an algorithm to quantify that should take some effort. It warms my heart to watch this stuff.
It certainly did get the thermals and especially the second time, there was a clear gain in altitude. Thank you very much for recording this for us !
Wow dude! That was so interesting. Maintaining its altitude with minimal power input was pretty impressive at any rate!
So cool! This has got me interested in autonomous again.
This is the one time I could have helped you lol LOVE THIS TY @3DR @aurdo and @apm for the Pixhawk and the devs I love this software for my filming rig!
I've been thermalling the same ASW-28 for years (by eye and with a vario). It works very well once you get the hang of it. From the KML file it looks like you were half in and half out of the thermal. On one side of the loops you were rising, and on the other side you were sinking. It's not enough just to circle when you detect a thermal, you've got to constantly adjust the turning radius to stay in it, otherwise it will just spit you out. Good idea to go to a large open area like a desert, a couple of days out there will really up your thermal skills, enough to let you tune the autonomous mode a fair bit better.
There is a setting called a geofence that is essentially a digital fence that doesn’t let your plane leave the area. Don’t know if it would work for this but I have used it for autonomous search missions and it works great!
Watvching this vid I am impressed with how much knoweledge there is ahead of me, as I am just making my first steps in RC motorised gliders. Fantastic, stimulating, educative content. Keep up the good work!
stop playing games bro and have that thing follow a GPS heading in auto mode with one kilo of coke and makes some serious money
I don't think you can make serious money by flying around Coca-Cola products...
@@mbirth yes *C o c a* cola products
Aha shh don't reveal his true funding for the channel 😂
Aaannd then get tighter legal restrictions put on RC aircraft
@@charlesturner897 and? What are they going to do?
Love to watch these autonomous vehicles you make. It looks like the day you are flying, the atmosphere is very stable. Try it again on a day with a few cumulous clouds around, mid afternoon. I've caught great thermals during my hang gliding days. Cheers!
I've been flying RC since the late eighties and the technology keeps growing by leaps and bounds. I always like to do my aerobatics without gyros or mixing and my soaring on slope lift the same and search lift by eye. Occasionally a thermal drifts into the slope on light lift days and is usually evidenced by seagulls or pelicans. I once got in lift with a huge golden eagle. That was wind shear lift flying near Davenport CA across from big creek lumber. Unbelievably strong with an unlimited ceiling but a very turbulent bottom that was about 500 ft elevation and really difficult to get into. I was flying a Bob Martin sr7 that I had for twenty years and had an amazing amount of countless hours flying. That thing was and still is unbelievable IMHO
Wow, the low flying over the hill with trees was reeeeally sketchy imo, dude you're the king of RC for me. I wanna try everything you make but this is whole new league of wallet/time killer. Love it!
Lol, that little “communication lost” at the end was cute. :)
One of my best learning opportunities....University of TH-cam does it again!
You definitely have the best ground station I've seen yet!
Very cool! Love the efficiency of riding thermals vs. relying on the motor, just fascinating to watch. Looking forward to your next video 😊
You should really try this again! I really want to see more autonomous flight episodes, and this one sure is special!
At 13:45 you see the air going down, even is ground level is going up (ridge). This seems to be caused by the cooler air over the trees. The air is going in up over the valley, which causes air to be drawn from the cooler places, in this case the hills with trees. I agree, no thermal bubbles here, just the general air over over the valley rising at the expense of the air over the forests.
Highly recommend staying within FAA drone flight rules, especially when publishing. Absolutely loved this!
Very impressive ! And all that with over the shelf hardware and software hence with minimal cost !
Finally someone took the trouble to try it out. Thanks for the video.
Suggestion:
Wouldn't a geofence with a few rallies be helpful against the plane leaving?
As a pilot, I would suggest the following... When your plane got to the trees it would sink because of the air around trees being an average of 10 degrees lower than the surrounding air. So at the beginning of the slope (where the air hit the hill and trees) you had the maximum lift. Can you program the thing to stay and go back and forth in the spot where you hit maximum lift? Like set a number for the lift you are seeking and GPS-like stay there? Your "autonomous" lift seeking thing is just looking for the minimum up and drifting in that direction into lower lift areas that still meet the minimum lift requirement. When it starts getting a lower lift it should turn back to the maximum lift spot, right? Love your videos, thanks for sharing... bye
your solar plane + ardu soaring
and a spare battery for return to home
autonomous solar drones incoming
@marthale7 Very unlikely. To heavy, to risky and to expensive. Satellites are way better (and possible with current technology)
This was a super cool look into what I think is one of the most interesting aspects of RC flight.
super interesting i always wanted to have this set up, can't wait for the desert video !!
If you haven't already, look into the "forward slip" technique for slowing without flaps using the rudder and opposite aileron. Works really well once you get it down.
Looks like a hoot. I'm ancient enough to remember going from analog to digital (pcm) RC, not to mention the "galloping ghost". lol. Thermals are generated by heated ground, the darker the better, ridge lift is an uplifting from the wind caused by the ridge, it would need to fly parallel to the ridge. (used to hang glide too. lol). Need to look further into this. Thanks for the effort you took putting this together!
Great video as usual , if i remember correctly , you could use geofence to stop it getting "out of bounds" ?
He used the plane to draw lines on his laptop. That would ruin the art.
Yes, geofencing is what he needs to setup : ardupilot.org/plane/docs/geofencing.html#geofencing
Just wonderful man, looking forward to watch your superb experiments, .... Start feeling I'll need to install Ardu on my Matek FC, moving from INAV, and realy get into Ardu and all theses beautifull fonctions. keep soaring and many thanks for sharing
An incredible implementation, congratulations. Please publish a complete tutorial that I want to do the same.
Great video! I had just ordered an ASW28 from HK, then I see this video on TH-cam! I think the Phoenix 2400 would work better. You can get a PNF version on banggood for $130. It is a great plane. I flew it for 4 hours and 44 minutes using lithium ion batteries. There is a video of it on my channel. Thanks for the awesome videos Daniel!
The P2K, would be a terrible glider for this kinda soaring, being that it's more of a hot-liner, than a floater.
That's amazing Matthew, did you lower the LVC in the ESC? Must have been mostly thermal flight. Don't know if I care to fly that long all at one sitting. LOL Unless of course in my hang glider.
Yeah, I used a BLheli esc that does not have a LVC. It was running arduplane on a F405 Wing flight controller. I was just there to monitor it. The motor was spinning the whole time. There might have been a little help from thermals, but the flight controller kept the altitude fixed.
If you watch the video you can see that it is picking termals, every time it changes mode you can see the wings lift from the tips, a good sign that its it in a thermal.
As you said, a trip to desert will really show you what it does and you can expect to spend a day with it in the air, knowing the total amount of radio contact you have is very important if you want to stay in control as any thermal it finds will shift from one mode to the other and wwithout good radfio contact jit can overide homing programmes.
Please combine with your solar plane!
Great work. :)
I'm a computer vision and machine learning researcher. If you can think of ways I can help, I'd love to. I think some very simple vision and reinforcement learning could allow it to actively look for likely locations for thermals. Rather than just accidental find them.
I'm pretty sure that your plane was tracking a thermal. If you look at the FPV image, you see that when thermalling, the angle of bank is remaining reasonably constant, with just minor corrections for air turbulence that has upset the glider a little bit. So, it's "centered" on a thermal and managed to stay with the thermal for a reasonable distance. I've got 30 years experience flying 1:1 scale sailplanes. and I say Ardupilot does pretty well as a soaring autopilot.
In the 80’s my grandfather and his friends started Soaring products a company that made the Thermic sniffler. The sniffler would send an audible signal to a radio that the pilot wore on his belt. You were able to hear the thermal. They later sold it to ACE RC. The soaring products snifflers are still highly sought after by glider pilots.
It looks like you have a problem with your current sensor setup. It's not showing the drain from your VTX, receiver, flight controller etc. That means your battery life won't match up. That's especially important for your glider application. Always make sure all of those are behind the current sensor.
This is amazing. I love your videos. Thanks for all your efforts...
I like his efforts, they are great, but.... .... author plays with minuscule amounts of drag on his tailplane yet there is more, MUCH more drag at wing/fuselage joint than the ENTIRE rest of his plane combined.... Its a giant diffuser nozzle...
Challenge. Fly from Chicago to Holland, MI. I think with a UHF you could get it all the way across Lake Michigan. Second, would love to see you get one of these in the jet stream. Nerding out over your videos. Thank you!
Love the technical details. I’d be interested to see if you set your waypoint mission so that it takes you over some elements which are more likely to be generating thermals, like an asphalt flat roof, a road, or a car park.
The thermal was coming from the warm asphalt of the road. That's pretty common for that area. Your peak altitude is just downwind from where the aircraft crossed the road.
To me that looks similar to a paragliding track when in a thermal, you can actually tell if you are falling out of a thermal in paragliding so I'm guessing this does the same thing. Feeling which side of the wing has more life to find the middle of the thermal. Amazing tech
Excellent excellent video. I have two ASW 28s and they are fairly good soaring platforms for the price. Really excited about Ardupilot's thermal hunting feature. I'll squeeze a Matek 405 wing FC in mine in conjunction with a Taranis X9D transmitter and a R9 long range receiver.
The auto thermal mode should have the plane thermal to the right,
In the northern hemisphere, thermals usually twist counter clockwise.
By doing so, it would enable the plane to stay close to the center of the thermal, where most energy can be found.
You know nothing about soaring. Thermals do have airflow around the center but long established testing has shown that they turn about 50% in either direction. I have over 4,000h in gliders, 40,000mi x-country.
@@LS8eighteen
You should've been paying more attention during your flights.
Thermals are a localised low pressure areas. In the Northern hemisphere they tend to turn counter clockwise. This is called Coriolis effect. Go and re-read up on your fundamentals of meteorology.
@@fliteshare Coriolis effect is real, but only effects the system if it's significantly large in proportion to the other forces in the system... which it is at large scales, but not at small scales. At small scales, it diminishes to be negligible, which is why, for example, the funnel of water draining through a hole starts spinning in a random direction despite the Coriolis that should be forcing it into the hemisphere-appropriate direction (unless you carefully set up a tub of water with a painstakingly controlled lack of disturbances, like Smarter Every Day and Veritasium did in a collab video, each with a tub of water in opposing hemispheres)
Maaaan... I love your videos!! I told this to Mr. Steel once, and now to you... I'm 31 years old.. and I want to be like you when I grow up!!
That is so cool. I would love to build a plane like this can can fly to a certain GPS location, circle around take pictures and return keeping at a certain altitude the whole time. I used to fly RC planes years ago but at that time it was all glow engines. With these Lithium batteries and awesome powerful energy efficient motors this hobby is very cool indeed. I look forward to getting back into it.
Great video. With solar power for the servos there are places in Hawaii where this could potentially stay aloft for 3-4 months in the summer.
That was beautiful, buddy. I do think that the powered glider was catching thermals though! consider the black body radiation of the paved road where there was a clear spike in altitude. The road heats the air directly above it well. Also, the forest vs. field data makes sense in terms of thermals because trees transpire and are excellent at absorbing heat and killing thermals. The albedo effect off the fields is notably higher where the heat may be better reflected out.
Dude that is two thermals being tracked right there. You see birds flying in tight circles in thermals that move slowly across the ground exactly like your plane was doing. The ardu definitely works!
Very cool, you should try it on the solar glider.
Jacob, look in his older videos. I believe there is one or two videos about solar power gliders. very cool stuff.
@@Snarky_Radio I believe Jacob is saying he should use autonomy on his solar plane.
@@grahamgrecian1332 Gotcha unemployed. thank you for pointing that out.
Awesome video. When searching for thermals, one of the signs is when the tip of a wing grazes a column of rising air and the plane twitches away from the thermal. The strategy then is to turn opposite to that in order to enter into the thermal. I wonder if the ardupilot algorithms could/does? use IMU data to detect and use this.
have you thought of making a build video?? great set up.did you Laminate the plain??
my ASW 28 is on it's way soon. spare wing, and all the parts to put together one more minus electronics and servos. the second one will be a custom FPV long range platform .
THANKS for the inspiration.
Love your videos man! This should be your FPV/RC link relay plane that lets you fly behind and around mountains :)
Hint: Do not bevel your trailing edges. Contrary to intuition, leaving them with sharp edges is better for drag than rounding them. If they have a very tall vertical edge, you could extend them with a tapered/triangular piece of balsa, resulting in a thin, sharp trailing edge.
I really have to get into to gliding
And maybe autonomous gliding
I love autonomy
I want to get into glidint too, but both my efforts failed - first i got a multiplex easyglider, but i built it so heavy that it never gained altitude without motor, then i got a tiny glider "mini swift" from hobbyking, but it doesnt glide at all too, in fact its kind of a hotliner and it has a very high stall speed and is overall quite fast.
Perhaps give it a more aggressive autotune, it should have cored better. I always fly my mission upwind of me to allow my glider to do most of the climbing as it flies back overhead, until like you, I chicken out! Well done #ArdusoarFTW
A video on how you put all your airplanes together would be fantastic.
What's your favourite fpv long-range set up on a powered glider?
Love this channel
Very cool. I'll put that in my Radian and let it fly all day by itself hahaha
For the trailing edges, squared off is more efficient unless you make it perfectly straight, stiff, and razor-sharp.
Would you, or have I missed it? Do a video on all your long range gear. You know, a "What's on my ground station" video. Thanks. Love watching
Impressive.
Your FPV gear setup will be used on my ASW from now on, just startet the change. Thanks
Don't worry about the auto thermal, fly it manually and chase the thermals yourself... it looks like it just reaches the thermal detection vertical speed threshold then just enters loiter and doesn't modify the loiter shape to follow the thermal at all..
I loved the ending! "communication lost!"
look at the horizontal-situation indicator during soar mode 5:50 and 11:00
negative AOA but still climbing with the motor off
I believe it was tracking a thermal but it wasn't climbing very efficiently in the thermal. You might want to restore your flap function and setup a soaring flight mode where the ailerons and flaps drop about 10 degrees. That will make it climb better in the thermals. You can probably make it go in and out of soaring mode programmatically too.
Awesome video! Thanks for sharing and giving a great commentary.
WOW! This is interesting! Thanks for sharing, Daniel!
YOUR THE FIRST GUY TO CONSIDER DRAG....AERODYNAMICS....GOOD JOB
Really awesome stuff. Makes me want to dive in on it. Thanks for posting!
The first slope soarers were autonomous controlled by a pendulum and a front fin to keep it pointing into wind
It would be nice if you provided links to the equipment that you installed. You could also get sponsors by providing that information. Tganks
That has to be the most advanced RC autopilot I have ever seen. Must have cost a fortune.
Lower RF frequency for longer wave length produce less propagation loss to any RF up: down link.
Half the frequency produce 4x link budget. 900MHz from 2.4GHz gives us 7x link budget. The catch is antenna size is linear proportion larger.
Man this is so awesome. I wish I could afford the gear to build this. Autonomous control is sick.
Its wierd, for the whole "thermal hunting" flight segments the vertical speed almost always showed positive, but the altitude steadily decreased and both times the plane ended up way lower then when it started this mode. Also from what i heard, thermals are strongest over fields, and there's really no thermals over forests, and if the hill is not very steep and covered with trees so that would mostly break up ridge lift, so i'm not surprised that it rised over field and sinked over the forest.
I’d like to see a plot of altitude and vertical speed vs. airspeed. Curious if it knows to go fast in sink and slow in thermals. Great video! I have to get my sailplanes out now.
Back when I flew hang gliders...when missing one thermal meant you were likely on the ground...I used to envision a little cluster of soaring drones that helped search for lift. Seems more than possible now.
Nice scenery. Hardanger in Norway is even better. Planning on making a video from there later this year.
This system would probably not be able to use updrift caused by mountains? Our mountains rise 1000 meters almost straight up from sea level. Obstacle detection would be nice to add, but I'm not that good at coding.
There is an exciting future in autonomous aircraft, specially in laser mapping, forest management and search & rescue. Such a large plane could carry a companion computer (ex. Intel Edison), extra camera-laser systems and SSD storage.
The KML file clearly shows that the glider was centered in the core and drifting downwind along with the thermal.
Really interesting! I guess you've already thought about implementing this sistem into your solar plane, maybe with a big battery tossed in. Would be really cool to see if it could achieve enough energy to sustain a 24h flight, wandering in the desert on a sunny day!
Something seems off. The climb rate was positive, averaging around 2, on your flight home, but the altitude was constantly descending.
Yep - I agree on that one. The m/s climb/descend rate doesn‘t correspond at all with the GPS altitude. Since I think GPS is correct, I assume that your vario meter is installed at a position where it senses pressure changes and of course interprets them as climb/descend, while they‘re actually aerodynamically caused pressure changes and don‘t correspond at all to climb/descend. Try to place the sensor at another position. But very cool project bro! :-).
I would love to see the solar plane again.
Really neat, I might try to set up something like this, have a ton of little solar cells I can build into the top of a wing easily for forever flight.
Enabling geofence may work for catching thermals within a particular range.. nice work 👍👍👍