APX4 2.0.0

Compatibility

Please ensure to use Auterion Mission Control v1.9.1 or newer:

AMC 1.9.0

What’s new

Powered-by-Auterion

• FMU-V5X / Skynode support.

• Pre-emptive geofence capability for fixed wing aircraft. This feature ensures that fixed-wing flight is constrained entirely within the geofence. Instead of simply triggering an action when the fence is breached, it predicts the violation point and sets a suitable loiter point inside the fence to stop the breach ever happening.

• Acceleration-based horizontal stick mapping. This allows mapping of control sticks to acceleration instead of velocity, which provides more intuitive gas-pedal-like input.

• Mavlink Gimbal V2 Protocol support. More information about the protocol can be found in this page.

• Multicopters follow a smooth/rounded curve when changing direction at a waypoint. This improves on the previous behaviour, where direction changes could be fairly abrupt.

• MAVSDK tests are now adjusted to use lockstep time. The use of absolute adapted timestamps based on the PX4 time means that tests can now be safely run faster than realtime.

• Delayed failsafe activation on data link loss. Now, if manual control data packets are lost in Position/mission modes, the vehicle waits in hold mode (for configurable time) before executing the failsafe action (e.g. Return mode).

• GPS heading support enabled in the uBlox F9P GPS driver.

• Failure injection in Mission mode. This allows developers to test the system response to failures when developing new features (MAVSDK has been extended with a plugin to make it easy to inject failures of different types).

• Support for MCP23009 GPIO extender was added to the FMU-V5X (Skynode).

• We added param show-for-airframe command to make the airframe bring-up easier.

Powered-by-upstream-PX4

• All the goodies from PX4 Firmware release 1.10.2.

• Improvements on the MPU6000 IMU driver.

Bug fixes

Fixed-by-Auterion

• Low battery shutdown on disarm caused by errors being represented as negative integers e.g. -1 and getting reported through the normal sensor values which can be negative as well.

• Drifting in heavy side wind with acceleration-based stick input.

• Heading reset during takeoff too aggressive. The reset after takeoff (about 2-3 meters AGL) leads to a short spike on yaw control.

• In Return mode with VTOL, FMU switches to Position mode without any input. When back transition is triggered during return, the vehicle continues to fly in fixed wing mode because it magically switched to position mode.

• Rally points at higher latitudes don't take geographic distortion into account.

• Yaw at landing not correctly accounting for mag resets in flight.

• Takeoff ramp for smoother, faster takeoffs.

• Generic VTOL airframe breaks digital power module functionality in PX4. After selecting generic VTOL as airframe in AMC and rebooting the flight controller, battery information is no longer shown in AMC.

• Spurious error/warning messages coming from building the GPS driver with GCC 10.1.

• In Orbit mode, there is an unwanted acceleration when the right stick is deflected.

• Barometer initialisation problems (time between reset and first read) that might lead to flyaway.

• Yaw reset on takeoff.

• Flooding logs with errors from CM8JL65.

• VTOL no longer yawing towards the VTOL Takeoff & Transition waypoint, causing the mission to fail and triggering Return mode (which then itself has a bug).

• Acknowledging MAVLink commands that do not target the PX4 Firmware.

• Navigator not handling the estimator yaw reset is causing the vehicle in Mission mode not being able to continue to the first waypoint after takeoff.

Fixed-by-upstream-PX4:

• All the bug fixes applied in PX4 Firmware release 1.10.2.

• Fixed: barometer initialisation (time between reset and first read) that might lead to flyaway.

Auterion Distro

New Features

• Sony R10C support. AEPX4 automatically detects and sets up the Sony R10C when it is connected to the mission computer USB port. This means you can immediately control the camera via AMC and receive its video stream.

• Sony A7R support. AEPX4 now supports Sony A7R for: taking photos, video recording, video preview, switch between manual & auto exposure modes, setting ISO, shutter, aperture and white balance in manual mode, etc.

• Local updating of Firmware. The vehicle local updater allows you to update the AuterionOS together with all the Distro applications via USB-C or WiFi without needing to re-flash the board. A standard API was created to trigger an update, get update status and get general info about the release. It can also be used during manufacturing as it is part of the AuterionOS and not the customer distro.

• Pairing through secure VPN-based networks.

• Multi-GCS pairing. It is now possible to pair AMC (with 1 Microhard) to multiple secure networks.

• Flight controller can now be flashed as an OEM Developer. With one command, a developer can now update the APX4 firmware over USB-C or WiFi AP in a matter of seconds.

• Reduced delay when switching camera mode. In particular we reduced the delay when switching between video and photo capture.

• Local flight log download using AMC. Flight logs can now be downloaded from the vehicle using AMC rather than having to get them via Auterion Suite.

• Automatic log upload from devices to Auterion Suite.

• Sony cameras can now choose photo destination (USB host vs camera’s SD card). This is necessary for surveys because when the photos are stored on the camera’s SD card, the trigger interval can be much faster (5 seconds vs 2 seconds). It is configured using a parameter.

Bug fixes

The following bugs have been fixed:

• In the Payload Manager, sometimes the camera doesn't have enough time to stop recording and it starts switching mode. The mode switching then hangs and never recovers.

• One receives the QX30 xml definition even when using the Sony R10C, causing many parameter values to not exist.

• With the Sony R10C, the first time one tries to go to photo mode it fails. When this happens the video stream breaks and the camera controls in AMC disappear and then come back after a few seconds. When they come back it’s still in video mode. Sometimes it works if one tries again while some other times one gets this issue multiple times before it succeeds to switch.

• Flashing status in the Suite is broken.

• Pairing Manager sometimes runs into a race condition that invalidates the pairing process.

• Several issues cause the Sony cameras to crash. The biggest issue is caused by a misuse of the auto-exposure.

• The round trip time delay between mission computer and autopilot is now fixed.

• A case of package duplication from processes running MAVSDK might lead to a wrong package drop estimation in AMC. This behavior is now fixed.

• hostname is being wrongly set on the distro.

• One cannot get a video stream from the Sony QX30 over USB-C or WiFi, though the camera controls are available and the video streaming over Microhard radio works.

• One gets a MAVLink packet loss rate of >=97%, as reported by AMC. This is observable over USB-C.

• MAVSDK timesync reports RTT too high for timesync.