On Tue, 16 Feb 2016 08:48:49 -0800, Giaco wrote:

"The rate of 4 Hz appeared to be a good balance between computational
usage and thermalling performance."

Wow, does this apply to human pilots too? If so then you have to make a
decision of to turn or not and which way to turn in less than one
second or you might be missing lift. Somehow this does not sound right,
especially because this small scale glider is flying slower than a
sailplane.

This is rather interesting from a controls and handling qualities
standpoint, given that the quickest most pilots are capable of
responding to an aircraft is between 4 and 5 Hz... who would have
thought we were optimized for anything related to flight!

Don't forget that ALOFT didn't use a vario: it took all its altitude and
climb rate data from the GPS receiver (they preferred climb rates read
off the GPS to autopilot's output because it was a less noisy signal),
but combined that with airspeed and (I think) pitch and roll rates output
by the autopilot. And then they downlinked all that to a laptop and
uploaded instructions, which they fed to the autopilot to control the
thermal search and centring.

I think they used a bidirectional link to a laptop, which did the
calculations, because there was nothing like the RaspberryPi or
BeagleBoard Black available at the time and also because it let them fine-
tune its calculations in real time while the model was in the air.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
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