After this, we went to test the Ar Drone (aka Julio) on the exterior with the Android application for getting the GPS coordinates and send them over wi-fi to our console application, but we had several problems:
- With the weight of the mobile phone on top, the flight becomes very unstable, specially if the day is a little bit windy like today was and it's almost impossible to control the flight (at least in an autonomous way);
- Because of the high balance of the drone with the mobile phone, faces are hard to recognize on video (because of the maximum 30 degrees declination);
- The GPS of the phone we had available was very inaccurate. Readings with the phone placed on a fixed place, could give more than 7 meters differences. This just ruins our hope of having a way to know the location of Julio on space, therefore, all functions based on Julio needing to know it's location could go by the drain (returning home, quadratic search pattern, parallel search pattern and search based on waypoints). With only about 2 weeks to deliver the project, it should be difficult for us to get a solution for this problem :(
The rest of today, we spent implementing a new algorithm for autonomous flight of Julio, because of the changes we've been done to implement a better performance on Maria console application, the previous algorithm was not responding correctly. We have now a base that we can think will be final, but we still need to do more tests and do some fine tuning, because at this time, we only have the Yaw (rotation movement) and Pitch (back and forward movement) working almost perfect. We still have to implement the Roll and Gaz (altitude).
