May 30, 2004 notes

 

Boosted hop

 

We changed our A/D from the AccessIO board to a Diamond-MM-32-AT PC104 A/D board.  Hopefully this one won’t give us as many problems.  We also went back to a dedicated battery for the actuators, instead of sharing it with the main power supply.  I couldn’t fit another big battery on the electronics board, so I had to mount it remotely.

 

On Tuesday we did eight hover tests trying to reduce the back and forth swaying in position hold a bit.  The variables that go into the control equation are angular position, angular rate, angular acceleration (not currently used), inertial velocity, and inertial position.  After trying variations on all the parameters, it turns out my initial guess worked best.  Next day analysis showed that while the initial ratios of parameters were probably pretty close to right, the total scaling of all the parameters could be increased quite a bit before hitting the maximum slew rate of the actuators.  I added a new parameter that globally scaled all the tipping parameters, and set it to 1.25 to boost everything up a bit.

 

The last tests we did on Tuesday were very short boosted hop tests on a long tether.  The first test was just a 1.0 second boost, which only gave it time to just come up to full throttle before transitioning to sustain and land mode.  This showed up a bug in the code where the position-hold gains weren’t active in boost mode, only in hover mode.  I fixed that, and we did another test with a 1.3 second boost, which did a nice little boost / sustain / land in place.  Unfortunately, when I went to burn off the remainder of the propellant, I accidentally tapped the boost button on the joystick again, and the vehicle hopped into the air.  Since it didn’t have enough propellant to complete the cycle, I immediately released the control button, but it still dropped from about five feet up, bending the frame a little.  This pointed out two more changes to make in the code:  I now require the boost button to be held down through the entire boost period, so if you release it early for any reason, it immediately goes into sustain / land.  I also force you to actually exit and restart the flight control program to do another boost launch.

 

On Saturday, we went out to our 100 acre test facility to do boosted hops.  We had a break in at the site recently, with someone taking an angle grinder to our gate and shed.  The police said that there are a lot of problems like that in rural areas because of people looking for anhydrous ammonia fertilizer for drug labs.  Hydrogen peroxide evidently wasn’t useful to them.

 

The wind was blowing hard, with gusts well over 20 mph, so we did an initial hover test to see how things went at low altitude.  The vehicle lifted off and just hung in place perfectly, even while the wind was blowing everything else around.  The 25% boost in the gains was a big improvement.

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_05_30/windyHover.mpg

 

We loaded up another carboy of propellant and set the flight profile for a 2.0 second boost.  The boost was perfect with 1.5G acceleration (0.5G above hover), but when it throttled down to sustain mode, the vehicle started rolling because the reduced throttle didn’t give it enough control authority to counteract the high winds.  After it had rolled past 20 degrees or so, the position hold feedback was now trying to point the vehicle in a direction that wouldn’t help the position, causing it to flip over about 20 feet from the ground.

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_05_30/boostedHop.mpg

 

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This is understandable behavior, because the lander is very aerodynamically asymmetric in many ways.  Under high winds, it wanted to roll-weathercock.  At hover or boost throttle, the vanes had enough control authority to fight it, but when the throttle was reduced for stabilize, the actuators went to max displacement (18 degrees minus whatever is needed for tipping control) and it still couldn’t hold roll.

 

If the software had been doing a full transform of the required position hold vector into vehicle space instead of just tying north/south to one axis and east/west to another axis, then the vehicle would have been able to go ahead and land even with it rolling significantly.  A simpler alternative would have been to just cancel the position hold modifiers if roll isn’t well under control, which would have still soft-landed the vehicle, but with notable horizontal velocity, so it would have tipped over.  In any case, we really want the vehicle to not roll.

 

Another factor that was unexpected was that there were large surges in the acceleration after boost while it was in the stabilization mode.  After boost, the vehicle tries to maintain a 0.3 g acceleration or 0.20 throttle level until it is time to throttle up for landing, whichever is greater.  The 0.3 g level is the greater on this vehicle, so it was in acceleration-hunt mode after the boost.  Our hovers have always had a pretty good up and down bounce to them because of the latency from moving the valve to actual engine thrust changing, but at hover thrust levels we have always been around the midpoint of the ball valve travel, while at 0.3 g thrust levels we are near the opening point of the ball valve where the flow changes are very non-linear, giving surges of over twice the amplitude.  That probably wouldn’t have affected the vehicle’s ability to land, but it could have caused it to come down harder than desired, depending on the phase of the surge.  I am going to have to do some work to reduce the surges in hover, which should also take care of them in stabilize mode.  A combination of prediction and a slowing of the valve movement on overshoot should take care of it.

 

Stripping the vehicle down showed that the frame was a wreck, a couple of the wire rope isolators were destroyed, and the electronics board had ripped its foam isolation ring apart, but everything else seems to be ok.  We are mindful of the fact that the last time we crashed a vehicle from altitude (much higher than this), the electronics seemed fine on the bench, but gave us serious problems in vehicles.  The combination of the much lower drop and the fact that the electronics board absorbed a lot of energy tearing the foam ring off gives us much hope that everything really is ok this time.  If not, I have backup gear on hand, although I would hate to go back to the older Crossbow FOG with the worse drift rate and the +15V supply voltage.

 

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We decided to convert the old 2’ diameter tubular vehicle over to jet vanes for the next test vehicle, which will give us a streamlined, axisymetric profile.  Rockets really ought to be axisymetric.  We pulled out the four small throat 90% peroxide engines and cut everything off the aluminum bulkhead.  We took one of the 7” diameter engines from a differentially throttled quadrant of the old big vehicle (the engine on the lander needed to run at over 500 psi for boost thrust, which the tube tank can’t handle, so we needed a bigger engine), and made mounting brackets for the jet vane board from the crashed lander.  Since the position hold seems to be working very well, we are mounting linear shock absorbers instead of wire rope isolators for landing gear, which may give it a chance of actually staying upright after landing, even with the very narrow base.  We are going to add ground contact sensors, since the soft landings and shock absorbers have been too soft to reliably trigger my acceleration based.

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_05_30/newVaneMount.jpg

 

The current electronics arrangement can’t be connected up in the tube, so I am taking this as an opportunity to rewire most of the board.  I am going to mount the batteries remotely, which frees up enough space to mount the A/D breakout board and the GPS flat instead of vertically, and I can orient the various pieces to require less wiring now.  The connector for the three batteries will serve as the main power switch, and the charger will be modified to accept the same plug.

 

Pieces of four previous vehicles are going into this new one, and it looks like we are going to have it back in the air for hover tests next Saturday, which will work well, because it is going to rain a lot this week, making the remote test site unusable.  We should be able to try another boosted hop the week after, weather permitting.  The roll-from-wind problem should be gone by the nature of the vehicle shape, but I am also going to up the stabilization throttle minimum to 0.5 G, just in case tipping from higher speeds becomes an issue.  This will waste propellant on the way down, but the new vehicle has a 60 gallon tank, so we can load up plenty of extra.  If we can get a burn time waiver, it should be capable of flights over 60 seconds.

 

Dropping this vehicle doesn’t really set us back at all, because going to a streamlined subscale vehicle will let us test a lot of things more representative of the big vehicle before we put it at risk, and it looks like we are only going to have one complete shop day lost to fabrication.  We have also finished the rework on the big vehicle with the 1/8” / ½” vanes and shafts replaced with 3/16” / ¾” vanes and shafts, and extra containment panels bolted behind the shaft slots in the cover to keep anything from blowing past.  We also covered the foam blocks with aluminum insulation protection, which should prevent the exhaust from ablating them so badly.  I am going to change a couple things in the wiring to sync up the big and little vehicles, but we may also hover test the big one next Saturday.  We will probably be ready for boosted hops of the big vehicle as soon as we prove everything out on the small one.

 

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