Arducopter Flips!

[R_Lefebvre]

Well, I finally did it.  First in history?  Powered sideways flips (I give it a shot of negative pitch when it's upside down).

At the end, I flipped it all around and then "bailed out" with stabilize, and it worked fine.  My wife couldn't keep the camera on it though.

After this, I tried to see what would happen if I pulled it full pitch up, as I know it hits a limit when vertical according to Leonard.  So... this is not a good thing to do on a heli anyway, it did all kinds of nasty things and I thought I'd lose it.  Flipped to stabilize and it saved itself.  It may have accumulated a DCM error because it seemed to have some "leans" for a while and then it was OK.

This may seem trivial to anybody who flies helicopters, but it's taken a lot of hard work to get to this point!  We now have a working acro mode for flybarless helis, which includes access to full negative pitch with a softer setting available in Stabilize mode.  Basically there's an "idle up" running in the APM.

Thanks to Leonard for the great stabilized acro mode!

Rob

[Joshua Johnson]

I'm glad you made a video I thought it was great!! Keep up the good work on the arducopter.

[u4eake]

Woohoo, congrats Robert!  This is a nice milestone for arducopter and for you !

[leonardthall]

Nice Job!

First time I did this in a quad testing the ACRO, I was very happy to be able to switch back to STABILIZE to!

Next step is to do the Earth Frame ACRO so you can show loops and flips in the same video, maybe even one after the other :)

I want to do a stall turn, that will be a test of the maths!

[Mark Colwell]

Robert, Congrats, Quite a historic day!  Keep up the great work.

[R_Lefebvre]

And here's another video of an auto mission at 10 m/s (36 km/h).  Sorry the quality is so bad, it was getting dark, and my video software made it worse.  The copter did really really well maintaining altitude now. I'm going to try 15 and then 20 later.  The only problems I had was with the take-off and landing, that is why I just did an RTL instead.

[Alex Lee]

That is so cool. Time for me to get back into helicopters. 

[Manfred Dickgiesser]

Robert

Great job, thanks for doing this great work.

I might slowly go to try that Acro flying....

[R_Lefebvre]

Manfred, if you try a flip, you have to do a rolling flip.  If you try to pitch-flip it, it gets stuck at 90° and does ugly things.  The earth frame acro controller can't handle flips.

[Carl La France]

Congrats ! Robert you are one of the pioneers! Have a Good Day!

[Marco Robustini]

Awesome! Congrats Robert!!!