ECC -13 acceptance and new article to CDC -13

I just realized that have not written about the newest development in my articles. My article, "Full Quaternion Based  Attitude Control for a Quadrotor", was accepted to ECC 2013 in Zurich, Switzerland! So this summer I will go there and present my results to the people there. This is really huge for me, I have still not finished my master thesis and I was able to publish in one of the biggest conferences. I'm really looking forward to this and I hope the response will be very good.

     One of the critiques on the article was the lack of experimental results but a new article has been submitted to Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) -13 with the experimental results. I can't reveal much because of confidentiality but I can say this much; the controller works perfectly and very close to the simulation results! So now it's just to wait and see if it will be accepted. Wish me luck!

What's up and new boards

There has been some time since the last update but here are some updates. Sadly a lot of time has gone to my master thesis so not as much time as I have wanted has gone to the KFly Project but that does not mean it has been standing still.

     I'm currently writing a post on the difference between different Kalman Filters such as the normal linear one, the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) and finally the Cubature Kalman Filter (CKF). I will also go into  how you tune these filters, what a "square-root" implementation is and what an adaptive filter is and how it works. I'm also thinking of adding how a Square-Root Adaptive Cubature Kalman Filter (SR-ACKF) implementation I'm working on works and it's benefits over a few other implementations.

     Some hardware changes has also been done and three new boards have been built. A friend of mine has been porting TauLabs (OpenPilot) for my board and yesterday we tried some code. We ended up bricking two of the boards so the JTAG programmer could not find them. In a small act of desperation we took an STM32F4Discovery and used the onboard ST-Link programmer via SWD and we were able to flash the boards again!

     The hardware changes we made because of a poor choice of ESD protection, the chip chosen was so small it was virtually impossible to get soldered properly (0.25  mm pitch UDF chip). Because of this I changed it to an SO-70 chip and now the board is ESD safe and working!

Three new KFly boards assembled and tested!

(On a side note, this was my first post written on a tablet. Yay!)