Improved altitude hold

We have stared to look at what is needed to make the Crazyflie position aware and to integrate the upcoming positioning system. The rough idea is to add a position estimation module to the firmware of the Crazyflie that will be responsible of estimating the current position based on data from internal or external sensors. The sensors could be mounted on the Crazyflie but it should also be possible to inject the position over radio from an external system. A control module will use the estimated position to try to navigate the copter to a desired position that could be set for instance by a user or by some navigation algorithm. If you want to participate in the design discussions or implementation head over to github where we will use issues for this conversation.

We decided that a suitable first step was to improve the altitude hold, so that is what we did last week. The code has been refactored and improved and we think the altitude hold is now working much better than before. It’s not perfect, still room for improvements :-)

Tilt compensation

While we were at it we also added a thrust compensation to avoid loosing altitude when tilting the copter. It turns out it makes flying easier as the pilot does not have to add extra thrust when moving around. Good for both human and automatic pilots.

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